


The Flying Empire

by starlady



Series: His Majesty's Aery [1]
Category: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: Airship, Alternate History, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, F/M, Feminist Themes, M/M, Wordcount: 30.000-50.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-07
Updated: 2010-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-10 10:46:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/98897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlady/pseuds/starlady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Holmes takes a case that leads him into contact with Countess Ada Lovelace and direct conflict with a controversial but well-placed officer of His Majesty's Aery, to Scotland and back to London via the skies above.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> The awesome accompanying art by darthneko is available [here](http://darthneko.deviantart.com/art/The-Flying-Empire-170601218). ♥
> 
> A huge thanks to [Naraht](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht) for the incisive beta, and for the Baedeker's--any remaining errors or infelicities are my own, as is the alternate history. (The title comes from an early story treatment for _Laputa: Castle in the Sky_.)

_London, 1882_

Had they known the degree to which she was going to discombobulate their comfortable, if frequently dangerous, lives before her first visit to 221B Baker Street N.W., Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson might have made better, or strictly speaking some, preparation for Victoria King’s arrival. As it was, they were in their customary state of semi-habile—Holmes unshaven in his strange patchwork mohair dressing gown, Watson in his trousers, braces, undershirt and bowler hat, Disraeli lying on the hearth rug in a fully conscious state. The doctor was engrossed in a medical journal, while the detective had the _Times_ in front of him; their landlady had just served tea, having reassured Holmes, as was to become almost a ritual in future years, that it was not poisoned. Not, however, that anyone would have thought less of Mrs. Hudson for having been tempted to that course of action; Sherlock Holmes, it was generally agreed by those who had cause to know, could try the patience of a saint.

Saint or no, the lady in question always acted with alacrity when callers came for either of her two gentleman lodgers, understanding as she did that callers generally meant income, and that income generally transformed itself into rent monies. So when a lady of quality in a green dress presented herself and inquired as to whether she could speak with the consulting detective, Mrs. Hudson climbed the stairs again directly.

“By all means, Nanny, send her in,” Holmes said airily, not looking up from his newspaper. In another man, his constitutional inability to conduct a conversation while actually looking at the other person involved in it might have been suspicious; for the detective, it was not especially notable. Mrs. Hudson heaved a sigh in the relative privacy of the hall and showed the lady upstairs.

She was not, Watson saw immediately, particularly pretty, though her emerald gown and sable wrap were well within the vanguard of current fashions and her brown hair was dressed flatteringly, if in a rather simple style. Both men noted immediately a peculiarity in her stride that neither could quite articulate; she had a trick of standing, too, that made her seem taller than her five feet five inches.

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I presume,” she said without preamble, advancing far enough into the supremely cluttered room to be able to stand near the fireplace, but evidently deciding that approaching any further through the debris was unworthy of the potential risk to life and limb. “And Dr. John Watson, as well, I see.”

She had a soprano voice, and she enunciated her words with the clarity of someone versed in public speaking. Now that she had come closer, Watson could see her clear dark eyes. Like the doctor’s, her complexion had a certain pale bronze shade to it, a permanent tan. But he had acquired his serving in Her Majesty’s armed forces, which of course was impossible for a woman.

“I am afraid you have the advantage of us, madam,” said Holmes smoothly; Holmes could be perfectly charming when he liked, or more precisely when he could be bothered.

“My name is Ca—Victoria King,” she said, stumbling slightly over the words. “Victoria Carlotta King.”

It was an unusual name—Watson could not recollect having met another woman named ‘Victoria’—but otherwise unremarkable. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” said Holmes. “And for what purpose did you seek me out, my dear?”

“I have it on good authority,” said Victoria King, “that you and Dr. Watson, together, are the most dangerous men in London.”

Watson stared, and even Holmes raised an eyebrow in a fashion that Watson was learning to recognize as a sign of mild surprise. “Miss King, whomever told you such a thing?” he asked. “I assure you, we are both—“

“You are about to tell me, obscure, or humble, or some other prevarication,” King interrupted, meeting his gaze directly. If she found his dark stare disturbing, as many people seemed to, she gave no sign, and Holmes could not very well look away. “Spare me, I beg you, Mr. Holmes. In light of the fact that I wish to engage your services, it would behove you not to protest too much.”

Watson looked on in more or less open amusement as Holmes blinked several times, clearly taken significantly aback by this woman. Eventually the detective recovered enough to say smoothly, “Quite. In that case, Miss King, may I enquire as to the nature of the matter in which you wish to engage me?”

“You may,” King said gravely, “but I cannot answer that question. I wish to place you on retainer, Mr. Holmes. What do you say to £250?”

Holmes blinked some more. “In toto, Miss King?”

She smiled thinly, brown eyes sharp as a scalpel’s edge and just as bright, and Watson had the disquieting sense that the ground beneath him and Holmes was crumbling away even as they stood upon it. “Per annum, Mr. Holmes.”

For a long moment there was no sound in the sitting room save Disraeli shifting on the tiger-skin rug. Watson very carefully did not look at Holmes. £250 was a modest annual salary; it was an unequivocal financial cushion that they could put to great use. That Victoria King could name such a sum without batting an eye suggested that she had significantly greater resources than were apparent from her appearance. For the first time, Watson wondered whether she might be somehow connected to the aristocracy.

In his scrupling not to look at Holmes, he looked closer at King, and it was then that he noticed the little design embroidered in emerald thread on her gloves. It was the sort of thing that might easily be mistaken for a fanciful trifle, but Watson had seen it before, on the battlefield in Afghanistan.

For an instant he was back there, or almost; Baker Street and central Asia superimposed themselves on each other in his vision, fighting for dominance, but Watson had learned what to do. He fixed his attention on his surroundings, turning towards Holmes and concentrating fully on the detective, who remained thrillingly animated even in repose. Should he look at King, he was quite certain she would observe his pallor, and it was clear now that she was counting on false pretences in this encounter.

“For £250 per annum, Miss King, I am afraid I must insist that I have some notion of what it is I shall be called upon to do,” Holmes was saying with an aplomb that would have been admirable on another man and was for him merely customary. Unshaven, with bruised knuckles and wearing a dirty shirt—one of Watson’s dirty shirts, in point of fact—beneath his dressing gown, the detective still managed to radiate his faith in his own rectitude. Watson loved him for that, among many other reasons.

“The Queen is dying, Mr. Holmes,” King said quietly, and Watson looked to Holmes at the non sequitur. The detective’s dark eyes met his for a moment, long enough to convey his own lack of insight, and then they both glanced back at their visitor. “Many things will change when the Prince of Wales inherits the throne, not least of which are several concerns which affect me materially. I wish to retain your services in the event that I shall be forced to defend what is mine.”

“Against the Prince of Wales?” Holmes asked, in a bland tone of voice that Watson knew to read as utter disbelief.

“Against everyone, Mr. Holmes,” King replied. “Against anyone.”

The fire popped while Holmes considered his answer. “Keep your money, Miss King,” he said at last, looking up at the ceiling. “I am afraid that I cannot accept cases on speculation, nor allow myself to be kept on retainer. Out of consideration for the needs of other clients I may take on, you understand.”

King deliberately turned her head to gaze at the royal cipher, _CR_, expertly etched into the wall with bullet holes. “I believe I do, Mr. Holmes,” she said after a long moment, and Watson realized that his hand was going for the revolver he did not have within reach. He stilled the motion instantly, but he knew that Holmes had marked it, and he would wager that King had too.

“Well,” she said, more naturally, “I thank you for your time nonetheless, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson, and I shall leave this”—she held up a folded cheque in one gloved hand—“here in case you should reconsider.” King leaned forward and placed the cheque against some of the bric-a-brac on the mantelpiece. “And so I bid you good day.”

“Good day, Miss King,” Holmes said, studying the wall or something else not readily apparent. He made no move to rise as etiquette dictated, and Watson was unwilling to show up his friend so blatantly, so they both remained where they were while King showed herself out.

Directly she had left Watson stood and crossed to the fireplace, plucking the cheque off the mantel. He swallowed involuntarily when he saw the amount; £250, as she had said, made out to Mr. Sherlock Holmes in a clear, bold hand. It was, he saw, drawn on the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Holmes, meanwhile, had thrown himself out of his chair and was craning his neck to stare out the window, evidently watching to determine which way King went. “Well?” said Watson, looking over at him.

“She had a carriage waiting,” the detective replied, still angling his head. “It departed southwards, which does not reveal much.” He took a step back from the window, though his hands were still on the sill. “How much is that cheque, mother hen?” he asked, and when Watson told him he actually looked surprised.

“Did you think she was bluffing?” Watson asked, picking his way through the clutter to the window.

“Not about the payment, specifically,” Holmes answered, plucking the cheque out of Watson’s hand and holding it up to the light. “But unquestionably about something. Did you note the design on her gloves? And the peculiarity of her posture?”

“I did indeed,” Watson said, and then he was unable to keep the grin off his face any longer. He crossed his arms and leaned back against the window frame, and when Holmes glanced at him he felt his grin widen.

“What on earth is so amusing?” the detective asked, and raised an eyebrow when Watson chuckled.

“Oh, nothing, old cock.”

“Watson, you are a man of many talents, but I am very much afraid that lying shall never be one of them,” said Holmes. “What are you laughing at?”

“Holmes, would you care to make a little wager?” Watson asked breezily, by way of reply.

“A wager?” Holmes frowned. “What sort of wager?”

“A slight flutter, really,” said Watson, “nothing serious.”

The detective glanced at him, and Watson saw the corners of his moth quirk in a little grin of his own. “Name your terms, Doctor,” said Holmes seriously.

“They are quite simple. I believe that I know the answer to the riddle of Miss Victoria King—who she is, I mean, and why she bears that design on her gloves and walks in that peculiar fashion. The wager is that you will not be able to deduce the solution within, oh, a week.”

Holmes’s black eyebrows had climbed nearly into his dishevelled hair during the doctor’s little speech. “A week,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Those are uncommonly generous terms, old boy. And what shall the stakes be?”

Watson had given less thought to that question than to the idea of the bet, but his eyes fell on the cheque still in Holmes’s hand and he immediately knew the answer. “The loser,” he said, “shall treat the winner to supper at the Royal. And,” he added, “to an evening’s entertainment of his choice.”

Holmes smiled crookedly, and Watson knew his flatmate had taken his meaning; had they not been standing directly in the window, he very probably would have given in to the temptation posed by Holmes’s unshaven jaw and kissed him. As it was, they grinned at each other for a moment longer before Holmes said, “Watson, I am wounded. Clearly you undervalue my deductive abilities if you think that I cannot unravel the mystery posed by Miss King within a week’s time.”

“On the contrary, I assure you, old cock,” said Watson. “But the solution is quite extraordinary.”

“Hmm.” Holmes eyed him. “How am I to know that you did know the solution in advance?”

“You think I’d cheat?” Watson asked.

“Given the stakes, any man might be tempted to, ah, bend the rules,” Holmes said loftily, and Watson rolled his eyes.

“Oh, have it your way,” he said. “In the interests of fair play, I shall write the answer on this page in my notebook”—he held up the slim brown volume in question—“right now. And in return you, Holmes, must promise not to steal my notebook, or to read it.”

“I should never stoop so low,” said Holmes. “Really, Watson, you act as though I needed anything more than my intellect, a little spirit gum, and occasionally your assistance to solve a case. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Watson hid his smile. “Well, we shall see.”

“So we shall,” Holmes agreed, and stepped away from the window at last. “And on that note, I believe I am going out. Tell Mrs. Hudson not to hold dinner, won’t you?”

“Of course,” said Watson to his back; the sitting room door shut on Holmes’s gesture of acknowledgement. Letting his smile breach his face, the doctor reclaimed his chair and his friend’s discarded copy of the _Times_. It had been several weeks since Holmes’s last case, and Watson had privately begun to be concerned about the onset of one of the detective’s despondent sloughs. For that reason alone he would have been grateful to Miss Victoria King, despite his healthy foreboding at the import of her visit. He hoped it would take Holmes at least several days to figure out her circumstances, for all their sakes.

Involuntarily, the doctor glanced out the window, to the little slice of grey sky he could behold through it. But after a moment Watson very firmly put the thought from his mind. London was a long way from any battlefield, and the regulations in question were exceedingly strict.

 

Watson saw little of his friend for the next few days, but the chaos of Baker Street took on a more focused edge than its usual inchoate mayhem, and as a betting man the doctor would have laid money that the detective was well on his way to solving the mystery of Victoria King, one way or another. In the meantime Watson took himself off to his club, which he had joined not long after he’d begun lodging with Holmes in a desperate attempt to retain a connection, however tenuous, to the sort of existence in which ex-Army surgeons did not find themselves chasing through the alleys of London after footpads, thieves and murderers three or four nights out of seven. In his characteristically perverse fashion, Watson had quickly begun to find his fellow members deeply boring. Next to Holmes, everyone else just seemed dull: ink drawings juxtaposed with an oil painting.

The passage of a week found Watson ensconced in their sitting room, jotting down notes on Holmes’s last case—enciphered, of course, always enciphered; he’d become a minor cryptology expert in an astoundingly short time—in his current notebook while Mrs. Hudson’s luncheon, lovingly or at least assiduously prepared, cooled on the table in front of him. It was half past two already, with no sign of the detective, but Watson kept his temper firmly in check. Holmes would make his entrance eventually.

Sure enough, after another twenty minutes the door flew open with a bang and Holmes burst into the room, his face bearing a peculiar amalgamation of expressions. Watson was learning, slowly, to interpret his friend; he could recognize at least the unmistakable air of satisfaction Holmes wore like a cape when he had arrived at a solution to a particularly thorny problem. But it was tempered by something much less familiar: surprise? Unease? Something not quite comfortable, certainly.

Watson finished his last few words and closed his notebook, putting the cork back in his ink-bottle and laying down his pen. “Well, Holmes,” he said, “I take it you have won our wager.”

Holmes dropped into the chair across from him, shucking his dark coat and tossing it onto one of the armchairs. Evidently he had been caught in the rain after all. He said nothing for a long moment, merely sat back in the chair staring at the table.

“Holmes, have some tea,” Watson urged, removing the cosy from the pot and pouring them both cups of the steaming brown liquid. If anything it had sat too long, but there was sugar.

The detective appeared to take no notice of the cup that the doctor placed at his elbow. “Watson,” he said at last, coming back at last from whatever altitude to which he had ascended, and focusing on his friend with that same unnerving concentration Watson experienced too seldom, “may I inquire, how did you first learn of this?”

Watson reminded himself that Holmes _could not_ know about what he was asking—oh, almost certainly Holmes guessed, but he could not know for certain. So he ignored his first instinct in favour of his second and replied, as calmly as he could, “I treated a cloud jane on the field in Afghanistan. Our airships were delayed, you know, in advance of Maiwand; that is why the Afghans routed us so abominably. But in the earlier battles the Aery were invaluable.”

Holmes took that with the imperturbability that made the detective one of the few people to whom Watson would speak of the war, though the doctor did not volunteer recollections unprompted. Watson had learned quickly that almost no one wanted to hear about his experiences, and had stopped trying to explain them; his flatmate, by contrast, was genuinely interested, and offered sympathy without pity. 

After a moment, Holmes took a sip of his tea, and frowned into it. “Your usage of ‘cloud jane,’ my dear Watson, implies that the Aery’s…peculiarity…is well-known in military circles.”

“It is an open secret,” Watson said after a moment, “at least among the officers of the Army. I imagine that in Aery towns, such as Edinburgh, that fact is rather more open than secret, despite the regulations concerning secrecy among the aviators themselves.”

“I cannot quite believe,” Holmes admitted, “than an entire branch of Her Majesty’s military is entirely composed of women.”

Put baldly, it did seem rather incredible, but Watson no longer found it strange; he had seen enough strange and horrible things made real in the war that his threshold of disbelief was now somewhere in the upper atmosphere. The things he put up with from Holmes on a daily basis without a word of complaint or even a batting of an eye were ample proof of that. “Well,” he remarked dryly, “I am told that the surgeons are men.”

Holmes actually laughed. “I am almost surprised to find myself unsurprised. You observed the insignia on King’s gloves, I presume?”

“So did you,” Watson countered; “I merely already knew what it meant.”

“In a word: that Victoria King is a captain in Her Majesty’s Aery.”

“Congratulations,” Watson told him, a half-smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He opened the notebook again and flipped back a few pages, to the place where he had written in plaintext _Victoria King is an officer in the Aery_ under the date, _October 12, 1882_. This he passed to Holmes, who glanced over it and handed it back, looking slightly bored. “Our reservation at the Royal is for eight o’clock, by the bye.”

But Holmes shook his head, the motion unwontedly violent and graceless. “No, my dear Watson, it is you who have won,” he said; “I must forfeit, on account of outside assistance.”

Watson stared at Holmes, honestly shocked for the first time in months. “Outside assistance?” he repeated. “But, Holmes—from whom?”

The detective saw the expression on his physician’s face and laughed, putting a hand to his face and bending his head. “Oh, Watson,” he said when his hilarity had subsided somewhat. “Did I never tell you that I have a brother?”

“A brother?” said Watson, knowing that he sounded dumbfounded rather than tolerantly amused; they were falling out of their normal sphere into a new course, and he could not help but blame King for it, however irrationally. “No, Holmes, you certainly did not. May I ask—what is his name? Where does he live?” Even now, after more than a year of living together and nearly half that much time of total intimacy, he could not quite bring himself to say, _What is he like?_

But Holmes, of course, heard the question despite Watson’s tactful reticence. “My brother Mycroft,” he said, pouring himself more tea, “makes his home here in London, rather near his place of employment—which is Whitehall. He will not tell me precisely what he does in the government, but I am assured that he does it. Knowing Mycroft, he is probably the lynchpin of the system.”

“I see,” said Watson. “Do you—see your brother often?” It was a fascinating idea to him, not only to have a sibling but to live close enough to that person as to be able to visit with them whenever one pleased. The doctor’s family were all dead, all but one of them on other continents.

“Until this week I had not seen Mycroft since I was sixteen,” said Holmes. “Watson—you must understand, he is like me, only rather more so. Society does not agree with him.”

“Even yours?” Watson asked bluntly.

“Perhaps especially mine, in some ways. It is not that we are estranged; quite the contrary. It is just that Mycroft is devoted to order—“

“And you are not particularly well noted as a champion of the same,” Watson finished, interrupting.

Holmes smiled at him. “Precisely. But to own the truth, I hit a wall in the case of Captain King two days ago: I had one set of informants saying that she is exceedingly well-connected, particularly so given her lack of a title, and another saying that she is a servant of the Crown. I went to Mycroft in the hope that he could bridge the chasm in my deductions; Mycroft knows everything.”

“Everything?” Watson asked teasingly.

“Everything, my dear doctor.”

_Even the nature of our partnership? _Watson wondered, but did not ask; he could not quite think of a way in which the essential meaning, _Does your brother know that you are a practicing sodomite?_ did not shine through rather too clearly. Holmes preferred subterfuge.

“Mycroft sends his regards, incidentally,” Holmes said next, answering that particular question.

“And please give him mine in return,” Watson responded automatically, his attention sliding away from the conversation; thoughts of what he and Holmes did together habitually quickly gave rise to thoughts of what he and Holmes could be doing at that instant.

The detective grinned at him knowingly and reached for the plate of sandwiches. “So I shall,” he said; “perhaps the two of you shall even meet one day. I admit the idea is not without a certain attraction.”

Watson raised an eyebrow, steadfastly disregarding the sight of Holmes not only eating but enjoying his meal, which only occurred when the detective was paying some attention to it. “In the meantime, shall we split the bill for our dinner tonight, then?”

 “By all means,” the detective said, swallowing, and Watson reached out to brush crumbs from Holmes’s collar, the other man’s eyes dark on him in the waning afternoon light. They held their money jointly anyway. 

“Will you cash King’s cheque?” Watson asked, letting his hand rest across the ridge of Holmes’s collarbone, fingertips brushing his trapzeius.

Holmes glanced very briefly at Watson’s hand and then back at the doctor himself, eyes very slightly dilated. “Do you think we can afford not to?” he asked bluntly, and took another bite of the sandwich.

“No,” Watson admitted. “And I think she knew it.”

“I concur with your deduction, Watson,” said Holmes; “we’ll make a consulting investigator of you yet.”

“No, thank you, Holmes; I am content with medicine. It is not quite so different, you know.”

“I do, because you have told me.” Holmes set the sandwich back on his plate half-eaten. It was a constant wonder to Watson how the man could lead the life he did on so little nourishment, and he was unhappily certain that cocaine made up the deficit. The doctor knew, distantly, that he meant to break his friend of that particular habit eventually, but he had barely let himself consider his own determination consciously heretofore. He would need every ounce of ingenuity he possessed not only to do so but to do so without Holmes realizing, and he knew that he was not yet up to the task. He had been a different man, before he had gone to war, and he was only beginning to solidify his grasp of his new limits, and capacities.

He realized abruptly that Holmes was watching him, his scrutiny frank but not unkind. “Afghanistan?” the detective asked, and because the other man was not wholly wrong, Watson nodded.

Holmes leaned forward and kissed him, mustard still tingling on his lips and tongue. Watson put his other hand on Holmes’s shoulder and pulled the detective still closer, bold in his certainty that Holmes had locked the sitting room door behind him.

After a moment Holmes pulled back, studying him briefly. Watson bore it patiently, but did not relinquish his grip on the detective. “I take it you have no objections to an early start on the evening’s entertainments, then,” said Holmes, and Watson chuckled.

“None whatsoever, Holmes.”

“Good.” Holmes kissed him again, clearly trying to set a slightly slower pace than their usual wont, and Watson let him take the lead; he was as content to follow Holmes in this, for the time being, as he was in every other sphere.

It was only when they were lying on the sitting room floor, half out of their clothing on the tigerskin rug, that Holmes voiced the question which Watson knew immediately had been bedevilling him for a good twenty minutes. “Did she live, your cloud jane?” the detective asked, speaking very nearly into the skin of Watson’s flank. He looked up at Watson just as he said it, and the doctor sighed, glancing into the low fire in the grate rather than meet Holmes’s eyes.

“She was badly wounded even before she fell from her airship,” he answered, his writer’s brain telling him that the colour of the coals was the same as the sun that day when he knew perfectly well that was not the case. “I did what I could for her, but she was loath to remain on the ground. She vanished from the tent while I was drawing her a surette of morphine; I never saw her again.”

“Mm.” Holmes bent his head back to the skin of Watson’s stomach with renewed interest, but stopped when Watson reached down and put a hand to the angle of his jaw, bringing his head up.

“Do you have enough data now?” he asked, smiling to make clear his good humour, and Holmes grinned back up at him.

“One can never have too much data, Watson,” he said archly, voice regaining that smooth tone Watson both loved and loathed, depending on his mood; today he found it reassuring. “But I have _sufficient_ data concerning the Aery, I think, for now. At the moment I am far more concerned with data about _you_, my dear doctor. If you would be so obliging as to kiss me again, I might be able—“

As ever, Watson did as he was asked, and more; he kissed Holmes until he could feel the calculation falling out of him, until Holmes forgot all pretence of deductions and only kissed him back.


	2. London

In such fashion, more or less, six years went by. Old Queen Charlotte died in November, leaving her rakish son Leopold-Edward to ascend the throne as Edward VII. The Government used the pomp and ceremony of the avowedly liberal king’s coronation to announce quietly that the Aery was, in fact, a service of women. The outcry was perhaps predictable, and for a season London was awash in people waving placards of all kinds, mostly of the GUNS FOR WOMEN? WHY NOT VOTES? and A WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE HOME, NOT IN THE AIR sentiments. But since it was also made clear that the Aery was strictly a volunteer service, and that upon of being struck there from its members were strictly forbidden to marry, the brouhaha died out, save for a persistent scrum of suffragettes waving signs that said DIE FOR BRITAIN? WHY NOT VOTE IN IT? outside of Parliament. Like most other Londoners, Holmes and Watson ignored these zealous souls almost entirely.

It was harder to ignore the occasional aviatrix who could be seen walking around London in her green uniform and goggled leather cap, as gaudy and out of place as a peacock in full display, and just as likely to attract attention; indeed, everywhere but the immediate environs of Admiralty House Aery women were guaranteed to attract unabashed stares at best and heckling at worst. More than once Watson himself observed aviatrices giving as good as they got, verbally, and even brandishing their service revolvers at particularly obnoxious offenders; perhaps inevitably, the service gained a reputation for being rife with tribades and hoydens. Though the Aery quickly established a base in south London, and a station in the Tower, for Londoners familiarity bred only contempt for the aviators themselves, and unease at their majestic, ineffable vessels.

April of 1888 found Holmes and Watson in Baker Street, its walls a great deal more bullet-pocked and its ceilings sporting a much wider range of interesting stains than in the autumn of 1882, but otherwise unchanged. The even longer-suffering Mrs. Hudson still collected their rent each month and cooked their meals each day, and if Watson sometimes wondered how much their good landlady really knew he rarely let it trouble him: if she knew, she clearly had decided not to reveal them; and if she did not know by now, she never would. Disraeli’s place on the sitting-room floor had been taken by Gladstone, who in looks and in phlegmatic temperament was nearly identical to their first, untimely-departed dog.

In the interim Watson himself had established a respectable medical practice; out of necessity, this operated out of Baker Street, the rooms of which luckily divided handily, giving him a consultation room overlooking the street. His patients were for the most part an understanding lot, well able to tolerate his penchant for cancelling appointments at short notice to hare with Holmes over and across London.

In the past few weeks, however, there had been a marked dearth of haring; Holmes was between notable cases, and the boredom was beginning to tell on the detective in all the usual ways. Whilst seeing patients that day Watson had been pondering possible distractions, which was always a tricky business; Holmes could tolerate being cared for, but not coddled.

But in the event he need not have expended the effort, for when he bade farewell to his final appointment of the day, just at half past three, and stepped out into the corridor, he found Mrs. Hudson on the landing, evidently having just shown someone into the sitting room.

“Doctor!” she said when she saw him. “Mr. Holmes has a visitor; I was just about to fetch him tea while he waited. Would you care to join him?”

“Certainly,” Watson said, racking his brains to think whether the detective had said anything about his plans for the day at breakfast, and coming up with a decided negative. Still, that was not unusual, and it was hard to think of places in London that could be more dangerous to Holmes during the daytime than their sitting room. “I’m sure Holmes shall be back soon.”

Mrs. Hudson gave him a look that eloquently conveyed her scepticism at the idea that he or anyone could predict Holmes’s movements, which Watson in fairness had to concede. But after a moment she said, “As you like, Doctor,” and headed downstairs. Watson went the other way, up to the sitting room.

As their landlady had indicated, the sitting room was indeed occupied by a man whom Watson did not know, about sixty years old if the doctor was any judge, but still sitting quite erect on the one armchair that was reliably free of debris (because usually Watson sat in it) and obviously in quite good health. His white beard was still cut in the full fashion of the Carlist era, and Watson realized that he looked familiar somehow.

At Watson’s entrance their caller stood up politely, setting his hat on the chair behind him and walking forward a little so that Watson could meet him halfway. “Dr. Watson, I presume?” the man said forcefully, his voice a pleasant baritone. Most people who read the papers could pick Watson out of a crowd, given Holmes’s mania for keeping his likeness secret.

“Indeed, sir, but I am afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” Watson said easily, putting out a hand. “I confess you do look familiar, but—“

“Your pardon, Doctor; my name is Henry Babbage,” their visitor said, shaking Watson’s hand, and just like that it all fell into place. Henry Prevost Babbage, F.R.S., son of the late Sir Charles Babbage, F.R.S., inventor of the difference and analytical engines which, had propelled Britain to international predominance along with airships fuelled by American helium, for all that the Chinese would continue their resistance, to say nothing of their shipping silver and American guns to any Asian potentate who asked nicely.

For all his eccentricities, the late Sir Charles had been regarded as a national treasure, and his funeral in 1871 still stood out clearly in Watson’s mind sixteen years later; the Queen herself had led the mourners, followed closely by his children and long-time collaborator Countess Ada Lovelace: Sir Charles had been buried with all honour in Westminster Abbey. Since his father’s death Henry Babbage had worked steadily, if less brilliantly, and hand-in-glove with Countess Lovelace, continuing his father’s work. It was well known, if rarely mentioned openly, that his labours were amply rewarded by the Government, no matter which it was.

“Mr. Babbage!” said Watson, not having to feign his surprise. Indeed, he was now horribly grateful that Mrs. Watson was militant in removing the dirty dishes from the sitting room; she had won from Holmes several years back his carping concession that she could do so when it was unoccupied. The clutter no longer bothered Watson, precisely, since it had its place and did not invade his consulting room, but he was aware that it disconcerted other people, particularly potential clients. “It is an honour, sir, that you should come to us. I’m afraid, however, that I don’t know when Holmes will return.”

“It is no trouble, I assure you,” said Babbage, which was Watson’s first indication, other than the fact that someone like Babbage should come to Holmes at all, that his complaint was serious. And indeed the skin around the scientist’s brown eyes was tight, and his strong features somewhat drawn; he was worried. 

“Well, in that case, I shall keep you company,” the doctor assured the scientist, and both men resumed their seats. In front of the low fire Gladstone opened one eye long enough to survey both of them with deep apathy, then closed the same and resumed his afternoon nap. It was Watson’s conviction that their dog had been born old; if not, his constant service as the test subject of Holmes’s experimental concoctions was enough to prematurely age any creature.

Babbage had a ready mind and some surprisingly high connections, as well as the tailoring and the gossip to match, and he and Watson conversed amicably while they waited, sipping the tea that Mrs. Hudson brought with all decorum. It was probable that the scientist didn’t realize how much he was giving away; after seven years with Holmes, the doctor had become quite skilled at deduction and interrogation. Watson had already surreptitiously begun a new page in his notebook, making coded notes on several things Babbage let drop, to bring up with Holmes later.

But in the event the detective himself made his appearance twenty-six minutes later, breezing into the sitting room with the airy disregard of the man who was almost entirely responsible for its clutter. “Ah, Watson,” he said when he saw the doctor ensconced in his usual chair, “—and Mr. Babbage, I believe?”

Babbage rose again, and Watson did too, suppressing the impulse to grimace when his leg protested, though he saw Holmes’s gaze flick towards him for an instant, and knew that the detective had observed the whole thing. “Yes, Mr. Holmes, Henry Babbage—my father was Sir Charles Babbage, as you may know. I must thank you for hearing me out, truly.”

“Well, I haven’t heard you out yet, Mr. Babbage,” said Holmes, returning Babbage’s handshake and casting the doctor a glance of heavy irony while he did so. As usual, Watson kept a straight face. “Do sit down, and tell me everything.” The detective immediately flung himself down on the large cushion at the foot of Watson’s chair, still an incongruous royal blue underneath its varied collection of stains. Crossing his legs, he looked up at Babbage attentively; to his credit the scientist took the detective in stride, which was more than could be said of most clients. Why they expected a genius to behave like other men, Watson could not quite grasp, but then, Babbage’s father Sir Charles probably made Holmes seem tame, which was actually rather a frightening prospect to contemplate.

From his vantage point, looking down at the back of the detective’s neck, Watson could see that Holmes was in point of fact wearing one of the doctor’s own shirts, which if somewhat vexing was anything but unexpected. He could at least hope that the waistcoat Holmes was wearing did not belong to him as well.

There was no other obvious evidence of what Holmes had been doing out in London, and Watson had learned long ago not to speculate, since he was almost always dead wrong; Holmes could just as easily have gone to a tobacconist as he could have been licking rocks in graveyards, and both were equally plausible. Either Holmes would tell him in good time, or he wouldn’t, and in the meantime Babbage had collected himself to speak.

“As I said, and as I imagine you may have known or guessed, my father was the late Sir Charles Babbage,” he began, repeating himself with the air of someone who has rehearsed their remarks in their head. “And as I am sure you know that while he invented the difference engine himself, it was Ada, Countess Lovelace, who wrote the programs for it for years, until I learned enough to begin sharing in the workload. Countess Lovelace and I have continued to collaborate since my father’s death; she is as sharp as ever.” There was more than a tinge of wistfulness in his voice as Babbage spoke, and Watson realized abruptly that Countess Lovelace was only a few years older than the other man; what must it be like, to have worked so closely with such a brilliant woman for so long, with such a social gulf still between them? 

“All of which,” Babbage continued ruefully, “you may have read in the papers, or in the proceedings of the Society. To get to the point, Mr. Holmes, I am here because Countess Lovelace has gone missing. We are in the habit of keeping in daily correspondence, you see, in regards to our work, but I have not heard from her since she arrived in Edinburgh nearly two weeks ago.”

“Edinburgh?” Holmes repeated. “What was the Countess doing there, may I ask?”

“Earl Lovelace has a country house in Ross-shire, I believe,” Watson heard himself saying, and he was rewarded when Babbage nodded.

“Yes, that is true, although usually the family resides at Ockham Park when Parliament is not in session. But Countss Lovelace has a whim of steel.”

“And—you will forgive me, Mr. Babbage, I’m sure—you have come to me why, precisely?” said Holmes, tone just this side of insouciant. Watson surreptitiously kneed his friend in the arm, so as to say _Gently, old cock**, **_but the sharp shrug of Holmes’s shoulder replied just as clearly, _Leave me be, mother hen_. “Given the importance of yours and Countess Lovelace’s work to the Government, ought not you have contacted…them?”

Babbage exhaled loudly; the sound was too angry to be a sigh. “Mr. Holmes, I do not intend any slight when I say that availing myself of your services is not my first choice. But I cannot convince any of my contacts to take me seriously, and I believe that time is of the essence, not only for our work but for Countess Lovelace herself.”

“Surely it is harder to hide a Ch’ing spy in Edinburgh than it is in London,” Holmes remarked. From the tilt of his head, he was probably looking at the ceiling.

“Chinese, yes, but a Chinese agent, no,” said Babbage bluntly. “Silver is the same colour in every country, Mr. Holmes, and if the Chinese were to obtain even partial knowledge of what we are working on it would be disastrous for the empire. Their maths are catching up to ours regardless; it is only another ten years at most, I should wager, until they manage to invent their own difference engine, just by knowing that my father did it and reading the proceedings of the Society. The analytical engine will take longer, but not much.”

“And yet no one in the Government believes that the countess is missing,” said Watson carefully. From what Babbage was saying, it did sound rather incredible.

But the scientist scowled. “Yes, well, they see Countess Lovelace and, for all her undeniable accomplishment, assume that her contribution is less because of her sex or her age. I do not understand it myself, but then, bureaucrats are a species apart. And in fairness we are not officially affiliated with any government office—I do receive a stipend from several of the Ministries, but it is always in the form of reimbursements rather than advance payments. I am not sure that she is paid at all, to own the truth; delicacy, you understand, precludes me from inquiring directly.”

“Of course,” Holmes said blandly, drawing his knees up to his chest. “I take it that you have been working on some particularly sensitive development?”

Babbage nodded unhappily. “Yes, Mr. Holmes, we are. I am afraid that you would find the exact explanation excessively technical, to say nothing of the fact that the details are confidential, but our current work does have broad implications, and potential applicability for the military in particular.”

Watson did not have to see Holmes’s face to apprehend perfectly the detective’s reaction to _that_ statement; the abrupt stiffening of Holmes’s shoulders told all. Though Holmes was no stranger to violence, he loathed war with a passion, for the same reason, the doctor privately thought, that his friend would never have gone into the Yard himself, and was always reluctant to take cases for the aristocracy. 

Whether the scientist perceived his danger, however, was rendered moot when, after a long moment, Holmes said, “Very well, Mr. Babbage, I shall take your case, on the condition that you show me the last letters you had from Countess Lovelace before her disappearance.”

“Of course,” said Babbage immediately, looking vastly relieved; “and thank you very much indeed, Mr. Holmes. In point of fact I have the letters here”—he drew out a thin bundle of papers, tied with a black ribbon, from within his coat—“and additionally, since I am subsidized by the Government, I should be happy to cover your expenses in the matter, in addition to your usual fees.”

Holmes, his nose already buried in the first of the letters, made a vague noise of assent. Watson glanced down at him, assessing, and then back up at Babbage. “If you give me your direction, Mr. Babbage, I shall make sure that Holmes informs you as soon as he discovers anything of note. I should think we will take the Flying Scotsman tomorrow; I shall make arrangements immediately, in any case.”

Babbage seemed to find nothing amiss in the idea of someone else arranging things for an eccentric genius, and to his credit he immediately handed Watson his card as well as a substantial cash advance before showing himself out directly, sparing the doctor his usual need both to accept prolix thanks on Holmes’s behalf and to make excuses for the detective’s wilful disregard of social niceties. As soon as he heard the door to Baker Street close behind the scientist, however, Watson yielded to temptation and ran his fingers through Holmes’s disordered hair, and after a moment Holmes looked up. 

“Did you get his direction, mother hen?”

“Yes, and an advance on our expenses, for the train tickets,” Watson replied, holding up the banknotes Babbage had given him. “I must confess, old cock, I am surprised you took his case.”

“Well, Watson, unlike the good Henry Babbage, I know that Countess Lovelace has more to her life than can be gleaned from the proceedings of the Royal Society. You read the papers; I trust you are aware that she favours votes for women?”

“Vaguely, I suppose,” said Watson, racking his memory. Being a suffragette was not something a woman mentioned in company; nor was it considered polite for others to mention in her absence. “You think that Countess Lovelace has become the victim of anti-suffragists?” he asked a moment later, surprised.

“I don’t know what to think,” Holmes said tartly, “except that I do not have sufficient data to conjecture. But between the suffragettes and the Chinese, Watson, I am sure it will be intriguing. And in any event I am told that Edinburgh is lovely this time of year.”

Watson raised an eyebrow. “So had Countess Lovelace disappeared in Manchester, you should have declined?”

Holmes smirked at him. “You are the gambling man, Watson; what odds would you give me?”

“No bet,” Watson said instantly, and Holmes, laughing, got to his feet and disappeared through the sitting room door.

When the detective re-entered the room a few minutes later he had divested himself of coat and waistcoat, his cuffs unbuttoned beneath his bizarre dressing gown, now noticeably threadbare in patches, shoes and neckcloth nowhere to be seen. Holmes locked the sitting room door before rummaging, on his hands and knees, through the papers strewn about the floor. Watson had never been able to decide whether he believed the other man when he said that there was a hidden system within the chaos.

Eventually, however, Holmes evidently found what he sought and returned to his place at Watson’s feet, this time resting his head against the doctor’s right knee. Watson had his copy of Bradshaw in hand and was consulting timetables to Edinburgh; it appeared that his first instinct, the Flying Scotsman, had been the right one.

“I had no notion, Holmes, that you had the slightest interest in any other city,” he remarked presently, making a notation in his own notebook before setting the timetable aside. “Does London know you have a mistress?”

Holmes rolled his eyes, as he did when Watson, in his opinion, was being ridiculous. “Edinburgh is the Aery city, Watson, and the second city of the empire; either fact by itself should be enough to render it potentially interesting. You know I cannot abide boredom.”

“Well, I doubt very much that you shall be bored in Scotland,” said Watson. “It is a beautiful country, you know; my mother’s people hail from it, as a matter of fact.”

“Yes, Hamish, I had surmised as much,” said Holmes carelessly, folding up the month-old newspaper he had been perusing. “Do you have any people left there?”

The doctor shook his head. “Distant cousins; to own the truth I am not entirely sure of even their names. I could find out, but without my mother, we have practically nothing in common.”

“Ah,” said Holmes; Watson would have laid money that the detective had deduced all this years ago, and had merely sought confirmation after the fact. “I trust, however, that you shan’t mind making our arrangements?”

“Not at all,” said Watson tolerantly, and ran his hand through Holmes’s unruly hair once more before heaving himself to his feet, wincing a little as his leg protested. Evidently he had been mistaken in his expectation of illegal activities occurring between them, but of course there was always tonight, and tomorrow, and the day after that.

He was prevented from making progress towards the door, however, by Sherlock Holmes rising up onto his knees and grasping him about the waist like a limpet, his nose pressed into Watson’s shirt just above his belt buckle. “Don’t go just yet, mother hen,” the detective murmured, and the doctor was only too glad to acquiesce.

 

Holmes was gone when Watson returned a few hours later, having made what arrangements he could; given that they had just undertaken a new case, the detective’s absence was no especial cause for concern, and after packing both their bags the doctor retired early. Around midnight he was awoken briefly by Holmes collapsing into the bed beside him, but he fell back to sleep just as quickly. Some habits were ineradicable, which was no bad thing; sleeping lightly had saved his life on more than one occasion.

It was something of a struggle to chivvy Holmes out the door the next morning, but in the end they reached King’s Cross and their compartment on the Flying Scotsman with time to spare. Given that the Government would, in the end, be paying the cheque, Watson had booked them into a private, first class compartment; after they had put up their trunks Holmes promptly put his feet up on the seat across from him and curled into himself, falling asleep even before the train had left the station.

Watson sat opposite the detective, next to his feet, and locked the compartment door after the conductor took their tickets. From time to time on their northward journey the distinctive grand shadow of an airship passed overhead, putting the train into shade, and inevitably Watson would glance up, wondering what it must be like to travel at the speed of steam-powered flight. Military airships could make the nine-hour train journey from London to Edinburgh in just under five, but what little commercial aviation existed was prohibited over inland airspace; the Government had decreed decades ago that the risk of aerial bombardment was too great.

It was the Aery’s cardinal honour to transport the monarch on grand tours; Queen Charlotte and Prince Leopold had inaugurated the tradition the year after the Mutiny, when they had toured the empire in the royal yacht _Pegasus_ (inadvertently touching off the American War en route, but no one mentioned that). But aside from the royal family, few civilians ever enjoyed the privilege of the skies; nor did the Aery transport members of the other services, due to the dearth of space on its vessels and the suspicion with which its women were regarded even by their fellow military men.

They were in Lincolnshire, the fens stretching out to one side of the railway, before Holmes stirred, and when he opened one eye and spotted the last of the cake in Watson’s hand the detective sat up immediately. “Is that food?” he asked with unfeigned interest, and Watson, covering a smile, gestured at the basket Mrs. Hudson had packed, currently half-open on the seat beside him.

“Afternoon, old cock; you’re just in time for luncheon,” he said with a smirk which Holmes ignored with all dignity, leaning across Watson to help himself to the cold chicken sandwiches.

“The Midlands?” Holmes asked, looking out the compartment windows while he ate.

“Yes,” Watson confirmed. “We have several hours to Yorkshire yet, and then Berwick and Edinburgh.”

Holmes, perhaps tipped off by the slightly formal note in the doctor’s voice, glanced down at the book lying in Watson’s lap and raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “Mother hen, did you purchase a _Baedeker’s_?”

“There is nothing whatsoever wrong with Baedeker’s,” said Watson testily. “Nor is it ignoble to wish to familiarise myself with the territory before our arrival.”

The detective rolled his eyes and went back into the basket for some of the excellent cake, leaving Watson to take up the volume in question. Flipping to a page near the back, he read aloud, “’Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and one of the most romantically beautiful cities in Europe, is finely situated on a series of ridges, separated by ravines, about two miles to the south of the Firth of Forth, of which charming views are obtained from the higher points of the town. Perhaps no fairer—‘”

“Watson, please, I beg you,” said Holmes around a mouthful of cake, but Watson only grinned at him wickedly and raised his voice.

“’Perhaps no fairer or more harmonious combination of art and nature is to be found among the cities of the world, and even the buildings of little or no beauty in themselves generally blend happily with the surrounding scenery. The population, excluding Leith, is—‘”

Holmes snatched the book out of Watson’s hands, and, shutting it, tossed it to the floor, forestalling Watson’s grab for the book by gripping the doctor across the chest and pushing him back. “Watson,” said Holmes after a moment, in which Watson did his best to maintain an air of aggrieved silence, “we are not going to Edinburgh for a holiday.”

It was the doctor’s turn to roll his eyes. “Yes, Holmes, I had rather deduced that, thank you.” He made no attempt to move out from under the detective’s arm, and after a moment Holmes, looking into his eyes, sat back. _For that matter, what would we _do_ on a holiday? _Watson wondered, _en passant_, but dismissed the thought in favour of taking advantage of the opening Holmes had left.

“May I ask what you were doing last night, then?” he inquired. “I do hope it was related to the case, in light of the fact that we are going to Scotland for a case, and not a holiday.”

Holmes regarded him sardonically, his expression conveying perfectly that he understood Watson’s gambit and was yielding to it for his own purposes. “I took the liberty of perusing the British Museum’s back copies of the proceedings of the Royal Society,” he said after a moment. “Do you know that Countess Lovelace attended meetings of the Society for nearly twenty years before she was voted a Fellow?—at any rate, after the Museum I paid a call on Lovelace House.”

It took several seconds for the import of his words to sink in, and then Watson said, “Holmes, you _didn’t_,” and Holmes chuckled.

“Of course I did, mother hen,” he said, leaning back on the seat and glancing out the window with an unmistakable air of self-satisfaction. Watson might have found it infuriating were it not for its beauty. “Come, you cannot honestly tell me you did not wonder why, if Countess Lovelace has disappeared, Earl Lovelace has not raised alarums?”

“I should hazard that he either does not know or does not care,” Watson replied coolly, leaning back and crossing his ankles in an effort to forestall his leg stiffening too badly. The other attraction of travel by airship was the prospect of being able to move around freely in transit.

“I rather think both,” said Holmes; “certainly his servants believe so. What is the society locution for it?—they live separately? In any event it’s true enough.”

“Well, I imagine they have little in common now that their children are grown,” said Watson, not sure whether he was defending the Earl or the Countess but feeling compelled to speak regardless. “Their marriage was fifty years ago, after all, and aristocrats rarely marry for love.”

Holmes snorted. “God help me, Watson, should _we_ have nothing in common in forty years.”

The doctor did not dignify that comment with a response: what they did share would not change, but on the whole Holmes preferred primacy in most of those spheres. Watson generally saved his own deductive skills for those intervals in which they would do the most good; he had learned from the Army the value of holding one’s fire, even under assault.

“Did you learn anything at the Museum, then?” he asked instead, but Holmes merely shot annoyed glances at the cloudy sky visible out the window, which was as good as a denial. “Too technical, old cock?” Watson hazarded, and the detective scowled.

“In light of the fact that Henry Babbage is an acknowledged expert on the analytical engine, Watson, I think we may safely take his word for the risk inherent in Countess Lovelace’s current work falling into malevolent hands.”

“I see,” said Watson sagely, not bothering to conceal his amusement. “So on to Edinburgh, then.”

“Yes. Watson, does that damnable guidebook of yours say anything about the Aery?”

“I couldn’t say, Holmes, given that it is lying on the floor, and I am sitting here on the bench.” Holmes glanced back at the doctor, who met his eyes levelly, refusing to comprehend his insistent look. The detective was not the only manipulator in their partnership, though Watson took pains to be obvious when he stooped to it.

After a few moments in which only the clattering of the train over the tracks could be heard Holmes heaved a martyred sigh and slid off the bench to his knees and one hand, reaching out to snare the volume in question with the other. This he held aloft when he turned around, resting his other arm across Watson’s knees, and his head between them. “Read to me, Watson,” he said quietly, and Watson took the claret-coloured guidebook without further protest.

“Edinburgh Castle, I presume,” he said, flipping to the page in question. Holmes, who had not moved, nodded very slightly, his cheek rubbing Watson’s knee through the woollen fabric.

“’On the south side of the valley occupied by the West Princes Street Gardens rises the Castle, grandly situated on the summit of a bold rock, sloping gradually to Holyrood on the east but descending almost perpendicularly on the other three sides,’” he read, eyes skipping down and across the pages so as to give Holmes a digest. “’We enter by a drawbridge, crossing the old moat and passing under a portcullis, and follow the main road to the highest part of the enclosure. A magnificent view of the city and the Firth of Forth, with the Highland hills in the background, is obtained from the Bomb Battery and other points. The other buildings, chiefly the cardinal outpost and base of the Aery in Britain, including the Air Academy, are not shown; we should be advised that airships still use the Castle as a base for active operations, which do on occasion disrupt or even foreclose touring entirely.’”

He lifted his eyes from the book to see Holmes looking at him, an abstracted expression on his face. “Shall I go on?” he asked, and after a moment Holmes blinked, his gaze focusing on Watson.

“I think that’s quite enough for now, actually,” he said, and then gave the doctor a sly grin. “Watson, I find myself desperately tempted to theorize in advance of data. I want distraction.”

Watson shut the book and laid it down on the bench beside him. “What did you have in mind?”

“Allow me to demonstrate,” the detective said suavely, and then his hands were at Watson’s flies. The doctor managed to hold Holmes off long enough to draw the shades in the compartment, but his natural caution went no further; the rhythmic rumbling of the train over the tracks blended with the motion of the detective’s hands on his body as they progressed.


	3. Edinburgh

Their train arrived at Waverly Station at just past seven in the evening, and their cab delivered them to the Hotel Balmoral in time for a late dinner. A little work at the telegraph office in London had allowed Watson to engage two connecting rooms, and in the morning when Watson woke up in the bed in Holmes’s the detective was already gone on his investigations.

Despite Holmes’s injunctions it really was like a holiday for the first two days, particularly for Watson, who did not quite manage to insinuate himself onto every sojourn Holmes took and who consequently had a little spare time to see the city for itself, majestic beneath a sky that was unarguably clearer than London’s. Between the later sunsets and the lack of rain Watson felt drugged with sunlight; he caught himself smiling at the Aery women and girls who thronged the Castle and could be seen, singly and in twos and threes, passing through Princes Street with purposeful strides. Clearly suspicious, at best they nodded back politely, not pausing.

Watson had not been north of the Wall in more than twenty years, and he found the other great change in Scotland’s capital to be just as disorienting as its conspicuous population of Aery women: Edinburgh was now positively filled with Americans, or as they preferred to be called, Loyalists. These deluded souls, apparently of the conviction that since their Dissenting ancestors had gone out from Scotland two hundred years before they ought to go back to Scotland now that their native continent had thrown off the British yoke, had emigrated in droves after the end of the American War in ’65. The vast majority of Continentals, who had stayed behind to enjoy the fruits of victory, referred to it as the Second War of Independence.

The Loyalist population spanned all rungs of the social ladder, and partly in consequence of their numbers the Edinburgh theatre scene was a popular stop on the circuit for American stars of the stages operatic, dramatic, and terpsichorean, who after Paris frequently opted to bypass chilly London entirely in favour of a guaranteed welcome. The morning after their arrival, the papers were full of the fact that the noted American contralto Irene Adler was finishing a limited engagement at the Princess’s Theatre that very night, performing a recital programme of arias from her most noted roles. Watson made a mental note to purchase tickets on his perambulations through the city that day, and thought nothing more of it beyond the fact that Holmes would be pleased; the detective had a passion for opera.

Watson secured tickets for the performance at the Princess’s box office. That same evening, several things happened in succession that would alter not only the course of the case but indeed of their entire lives.

It started out innocently enough, in the dining room of the Balmoral; their waiter was just removing the soup course when the room abruptly hushed. Watson and Holmes both looked, with unerring instincts, not to the door itself but just inside it, where a figure in green stood erect against the bright lights of the entryway, goggled hat fastened at her hip next to a sword that Watson knew was not simply mess dress. He recognized Victoria King, six years older but with the lines of ten graven in her face, when she stepped into the light, and was not in the least surprised when she made her way over to their table. Traitor that he was, their waiter pulled out a chair for her without so much as an eyeblink.

Holmes and Watson both rose to their feet when she approached. King had become the preeminent Aery officer of her generation since King Edward had publically confirmed the fact that women comprised it: she had appeared before Parliament on several occasions, and was frequently quoted in the press whenever Aery concerns made the news. The rumours that she was a royal by-blow by one or another of the king’s brothers had grown correspondingly louder.

“Captain King,” Holmes said suavely, putting out a hand; “what an unexpected pleasure.”

“Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson,” King greeted them both, shaking hands in turn; “I did not know you were in Edinburgh.” She sat down, allowing the waiter to push in her chair with aristocratic indifference, and the two men resumed their seats. “Tell me, what brings you to our Athens of the north?”

“Oh, this and that,” the detective answered for them, as the waiter set a glass in front of King and poured wine into it, then refilled their own goblets. “It is quite a beautiful city, I must say.”

“Yes, one does find it exceedingly refreshing after the nacreous miasmas of London,” she agreed, and Watson was quite sure that she did not observe Holmes’s nearly imperceptible twitch at her calm insult to the capital. The detective loved London the way some men loved their mistresses, and given that he had just been declaiming to Watson about the oppressive nature of the orderly street-grid in the New Town, the doctor was sure that Holmes was not as enthralled with the empire’s second city as he claimed. But he knew better than to give Holmes’s game away, whatever it was.

“And you, Doctor?” King asked, turning towards him as she set her glass down on the table. “What are your thoughts on Edinburgh? Your family are from Scotland, are they not?”

Watson forced his tone to remain bland, though his instincts were telling him quite clearly to be on his guard. “Yes, ancestrally,” he confirmed; anyone who heard him speak knew exactly how deep the connection went. “But it has been decades since I have been north of the Wall. Edinburgh is greatly changed.”

King smiled suddenly, the expression taking years off her face. “Yes, we are out in the open now,” she agreed; “I remember when I first was a midshipwoman we had to pretend to be boys while in the Castle, and were strictly forbidden to wear our uniforms into town. Times have changed, God save the King.”

“God save the King,” Holmes and Watson both echoed ritually, shooting each other a glance under cover of lifting their glasses.

“Have you seen the Castle, then?” King said when they had all three sipped their wine, and when they replied in the negative she looked shocked. “You really must take the tour, Doctor, Mr. Holmes; I assure you the views from the battlements are quite extraordinary. Here, I shall give you my card—present this at the gate to the Air Academy and I shall arrange for you to be shown around the Aery station. I may even be able to obtain you seats on the ketch to Arthur’s Seat.”

Arthur’s Seat, a few miles outside the city walls, was the other main Aery station; airships docked either there or at the Castle. Watson made no attempt to conceal his delight when he thanked King for the opportunity, and she departed shortly thereafter, leaving the two men to contemplate the intention behind her seeking them out under the covert scrutiny of the entire dining room.

In light of the circumstances, they said nothing about the Aery captain until they were shut in their private box at the Princess’s, waiting for the curtain to go up. “What did you make of that, Watson?” Holmes asked as he settled himself into his upholstered chair, putting his chin in his hand and staring down at the stage and theatregoers below.

“I am quite disturbed that she knew we were here,” Watson said flatly, hanging up his coat and hat and taking his seat beside the detective; he had locked the box door and retained his swordstick, which he usually left in the rear. “Both as to her methods, and for the fact that she felt the need to see us at all.”

“I agree, mother hen,” said Holmes, still watching the stage, and then he glanced to the side and raised an eyebrow at Watson’s arranging the swordstick to lean against the crook of his chair. “You think she will arrange for Aery Amazons to attack us at the opera?”

“I think caution never hurt anybody,” Watson replied, but he returned the detective’s clasp of his fingers when Holmes took his hand briefly, feeling the calluses on his friend’s knuckles as he knew Holmes could feel the marks of surgery and frequent revolver usage on his own palm. At that moment the house lights went down, and, greatly daring, Watson lifted the back of Holmes’s hand to his lips for a brief kiss. Shortly thereafter the great green velvet curtain rose.

Irene Adler stepped onto the stage to polite applause; Edinburgers had a deserved reputation for theatrical discernment, and habitually withheld judgment until the end of a performance. From the box it was difficult to make out Adler’s features precisely; what was unmistakable was her emerald green gown, cut low in the décolletage so as to show off the great citrine diamond that flashed about her neck. She had dark brown hair, and surprisingly tanned skin, which was thrown into relief by her white satin opera gloves; all in all, in his judgment she was pretty.

But when Adler opened her mouth and began to sing, Watson realized that she was beautiful.

The doctor was no great operaphile; he had to consult his program to recognize the first aria as one of Ulrica’s from Verdi’s _Un ballo in maschera_, but he did not need to speak Italian to thrill to the fire and skill with which Adler sang. He was enchanted before the end of the first passage, and Holmes was rapt beside him, his eyes locked on the woman below.

The recital was over too soon; Adler sang arias from _Il trovatore, Lucrezia Borgia, La donna del lago _and _La Gioconda_ before closing with two of Angelina’s arias from _La Cenerentola_, and as the last notes faded into the stillness Holmes and Watson joined almost all the rest of the audience in rising to their feet. Adler took multiple bows and performed an excerpt from one of Rosina’s arias as an encore; someone from the first rows threw her a bouquet of red roses, and in the house lights the flowers glowed carnadine against her emerald dress. For an instant Watson fancied that she had met his eyes in the box; but of course it was only her gaze sweeping across the theatre equally, and then she vanished again behind the curtains.

The interior of the theatre immediately seemed dimmer, and beside him Holmes exhaled slowly and turned away from the stage. “Quite something, wasn’t she?” Watson asked, nodding towards the curtain, mostly to give Holmes a little more time to summon his ironic look.

The detective failed in that regardless; there was still a little open admiration on his face as he agreed hoarsely, “Yes,” and the doctor congratulated himself on an impulse well acted upon.

 

“Holmes,” said Watson in the cab on their way back to the Balmoral, “I have to ask: what of Countess Lovelace?”

Across from him Holmes stirred restlessly, his knees knocking a little against the doctor’s. “I am certain that Henry Babbage’s instincts were sound, Watson, but there seems to be little evidence for kidnapping,” he admitted. “Countess Lovelace checked into a suite at the Royal Hotel fifteen days ago. Twelve days ago she departed in the morning and sent back word that her luggage should be sent down to Surrey, and that is the last anyone in the Old or New Towns has seen of her.”

“That is not much to go on,” Watson observed redundantly, and Holmes made a frustrated noise.

“No indeed, mother hen. We shall have to keep looking.”

“Where?” Watson asked despite himself. “And when?”

Holmes grinned. “You’ll see.”

Despite the healthy foreboding which the detective’s cheerful secrecy engendered in him, in the morning Watson found that the answers to both his questions were fairly innocuous: Holmes wished to take Captain King up on her invitation of a tour of the private portions of the Castle that same day. So after a late breakfast they ascended the Mound and threaded their way up a rather steep climb past the Princes Street Gardens before crossing the drawbridge into Edinburgh Castle. Holmes made a great show of being interested in everything around them, which Watson of course knew was merely an excuse for them to proceed slowly, in deference to his leg.

Having a fixed goal in mind they were poor tourists; inside the Castle they ignored St. Margaret’s Chapel and the enormous Mons Meg cannon in front of it entirely in favour of ascending to the battlements, disregarding the placards explicating the siege of the Castle by the Young Pretender in the previous century. The prospects, when they ascended the height of the Bomb Battery, quite drove the slight ache in Watson’s leg from his mind.

Edinburgh lay in its Georgian magnificence all around them, the Castle being situated on its highest point; the Carlist glory of the airships above the city, moving against the blue sky, completed the panorama. Beside him even Holmes seemed temporarily at a loss for words.

Soon enough, however, Holmes shifted impatiently and they circled north around the ramparts at a leisurely pace, walking at close quarters as always. Eventually they found themselves at a barrier proclaiming No Admittance to the Public, and took the nearest stair down to the entrance of the Air Academy.

Holmes could be quite charming when he chose, but his efforts were wasted on the young lieutenant acting as gatekeeper; Watson thought her perhaps one or two-and-twenty, but the professional formality she exuded from within her emerald mess dress uniform made such judgments difficult. But their names were on the day’s visitor list, and they were waved inside without real difficulty.

Watson knew Holmes had intended illicit reconnaissance by the quickly hidden disappointed slump of his shoulders when Victoria King herself appeared from the interior of the building on the opposite side of the pebblestone quadrangle in which they found themselves; the entire building would not have been out of place in some corner of an Oxbridge college.

King, in undress uniform, greeted them cordially, and immediately set off on a tour of the Academy, the proud air of a parent suffusing her speeches.

“As you may know, gentlemen, the quality of girls’ education in our islands varies to a deplorable degree,” she said by way of introduction, leading them through the Academy’s main entrance and immediately up a wide, shallow flight of stairs. “While the Aery still relies on some amount of practical training, we do attract a greater mixture of backgrounds than the popular press would believe. Consequently all officer candidates enrol at the Academy for no less than two and no more than four years prior to setting foot among the clouds.”

While King spoke she led them down a series of corridors, all looking very much alike and very much like those of the public school in which Watson had spent some of the best and worst days of his youth. Though the occasional open classroom door he caught glimpses of girls in the same olive green uniforms, each with her hair hanging down her back in a single thick braid. The youngest, who looked about thirteen, giggled and whispered behind their hands when they spied King and the two men, but the oldest, ranging from sixteen to eighteen or so, regarded them with the distrust Watson recognized from the Aery women in the street, not graced by politeness.

Their footsteps echoed down the corridors, an irregular cadence beneath King’s explanations of the subjects midshipwomen studied: mathematics, navigation in three dimensions, at least one foreign language (usually German or Chinese), marksmanship, and also how to handle a sword, for boarding actions invariably afforded no time to reload one’s service revolver. Watson knew from bitter experience the truth of that fact, but he could not help but feel, though he knew better than to say, that women were better off never learning it.

“May I inquire, then, Captain, what drew you to the Aery?” Holmes said suddenly, when they had paused near a corner staircase, and King raised an eyebrow. “It seems in some ways almost a monastic way of life, for someone of your active disposition. For any woman of a social nature, I dare say.”

King chuckled. “We may be set apart from society, Mr. Holmes, but that does not mean we are unsociable. As for the reason I joined, I expect every woman here should tell you the same: better a bounded liberty in the sky than shut up in a house like a bird in a cage waiting on a man’s pleasure. You’re of a bohemian disposition yourself, sirs; surely you can sympathize with the feelings of suffocation induced by society?”

Watson opened his mouth to say that as radical as they were, should they so desire it they wanted only a trip to the altar with a willing woman to rejoin polite society, respectability intact, and that they needed no one’s permission to do so. But that was King’s point.

And at that moment a door some thirty feet up the corridor opened and a short, white-haired old woman in civilian dress, a black gown of expensive and tasteful cut, stepped out into it. When she saw them her sweet lined face brightened immediately, though the pince-nez perched on the end of her nose did nothing to hide the keen light in her pale blue eyes. “Captain King!” she exclaimed when she drew near them, voice still tinged with the aristocratic phrasings of the former reign; it was the diction Watson’s grandmother had emulated painstakingly.

For just an instant King’s handsome face tightened, but she recovered on the instant. “Countess Lovelace,” she said smoothly, “may I present Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, of London?”

Somehow Watson kept himself from gawping like a simpleton, but it was a near thing. Countess Lovelace’s hand, the skin wrinkled paper-fine, smelled of lavender-water when he pressed it to his lips and murmured automatically that it was an honour.

Countess Ada Lovelace stood perhaps five feet two inches tall, shorter by a head than Holmes and King and lacking a foot on Watson himself, but the tolerant serenity with which she carried herself admitted no sense of diminution. “Ah, the famous Sherlock Holmes!” she exclaimed when Holmes introduced himself. “I have read of your exploits in the paper, sir, but the stories never seem to include your likeness.”

“An omission I take great pains to continue, my lady,” Holmes replied with his easy suavity, but the countess gave him a teasing look.

“You deprive your adoring public of your handsome countenance, sir; how cruel,” she said, and Watson was astounded to see Holmes flush. He’d have thought it impossible. “And please, Mr. Holmes, Doctor, ‘Lady Ada’ will be quite sufficient. Even Her Majesty never called me by my full title.”

All three forbore from saying that the late Empress of India might take liberties not vouchsafed to less august personages. Instead Watson ventured, “And what brings you to the Academy, if I may ask, ma’am? Is the Royal Society conducting some experiment here?”

“Hardly,” Lovelace said with obvious exasperation. “My esteemed colleagues have something of an allergy to innovation outside a few bounded horizons. I am working on commission for the Aery, in point of fact; would you care to see?”

“We should be thrilled,” Holmes said without drawing a breath, neatly cutting off what certainly would have been a protest on King’s part. The countess smiled, genuinely pleased, and led them into the room whence she had emerged.

King, bringing up the rear, shut the door of what was clearly a laboratory behind them, allowing Holmes and Watson to marvel at its contents. Three of the four walls were faced with blackboards, the fourth being a stretch of lead-glass windows, and each blackboard was neatly covered with sets of calculations in varying states of completion. Watson recognized algebra, calculus, and even modular arithmetic, but several boards seemed to contain nothing but long sequences of numbers with no apparent order or connection. Those, he thought vaguely, had to do with the output of the analytical engine.

Equally fascinating, however, were the contents of the long tables that stretched across the room on its shorter axis; these were occupied by detailed diagrams, bits of clockwork, and partially disassembled mechanisms in roughly equal proportions. A difference engine sat in pride of place near the centre, its levers akimbo, pasteboard punchcards piled in a humble basket beside it.

Holmes prowled amongst the clockwork and computations, his face alight with the zeal of a connoisseur; Watson followed at a more sedate pace, and bent his attention to the diagrams. Not for nothing had he observed the Aery in action in Afghanistan seven years prior; he recognized the designs as a form of—

“It is an outgrowth of the theory behind the analytical engine,” Lovelace explained when Holmes admitted his incomprehension. “It is only a prototype at this stage, of course, but I have christened it the information bomb.”

Watson swallowed, the phrase bringing back shards of memories he’d tried to grind to dust; he’d succeeded only in dulling their edges. “Is it an actual explosive device?” he asked, still bent over the schematics. “Or something more abstract?”

“The mechanism must remain confidential, I am afraid, Doctor,” Lovelace said, with genuine regret in her dry sweet voice. “But I can tell you that it is designed to neutralize steam-powered contrivances as well as difference engines.”

Holmes had a chunk of clockwork in his clever hands, rotating the mechanism back and forth. “Does it work?” he asked bluntly, setting the mass of gears back down upon the table.

“I am not sure,” Lovelace admitted, with the unhappy frustration of thwarted curiosity. “I have supervised the construction of a prototype, but it has never been tested in the field. The theory is sound, I can assure you; the difficulty lies in realizing that theory with today’s level of technology.”

“Ah,” said the detective, his eyes drifting out the window to the airships visible above. In the still air the low thrum of their propellers was just barely audible.

King led them away shortly afterward, Holmes and Watson accepting a forceful invitation from Countess Lovelace to show their handsome features at a future meeting of the Royal Society. Sensing that all had not gone according to their hostess’s plan, the two men did not press King for any further impositions, and then they were again standing in the public precincts of the Castle.

“Well,” said Watson, adjusting the angle of his hat on his head, “case closed then, I suppose. Shall we telegram Babbage, and tell him that Countess Lovelace is working on a project independently?”

But Holmes stood with his hands in his pockets, a grim look on his face in the late afternoon breeze. “On the contrary, Watson, the mystery has deepened. We have answered the question of Countess Lovelace’s whereabouts; now we must find out why.” He looked back at Watson. “There is a long game being played here, and it is not hers.”

“It isn’t ours either,” the doctor reminded him as they set off back the way they had come, thief footsteps clacking on the pebblestone.

“You think we are being manipulated,” Holmes said, halting. It was not a question, and Watson shrugged uncomfortably.

“Babbage said he had not heard from the Countess at all, but she seemed to feel no need for secrecy concerning her presence here,” he pointed out. “We were perfect strangers, and she did not hesitate to introduce herself. It seems incongruous.”

“Ye-e-es,” said Holmes, drawing out the word in consideration, his eyes on the ground even when they resumed walking. “Yes, my dear fellow, I believe you are on to something.”

Watson smiled to himself, and waited until they were walking across the drawbridge before delivering his follow-through. “Of course,” he remarked, “the Countess could simply have been undone by your beautiful face.”

The detective scowled. “Watson, really—“

“All plans forgotten at the first sight of your beguiling countenance,” the doctor continued, losing the battle against his smile as Holmes’s annoyance grew clearer, the detective’s eyebrows lowering. “Your looks, Holmes, are devastating to rational thought. Of course, that is how you are so consistently sup—“

“Watson!” The detective snapped, and the doctor laughed. After a minute, Holmes’s expression cracked at the edges, a smile of his own showing through, and they made their way back down into Edinburgh chuckling.

 

A few hours later, however, Watson having insisted that they eat, he found himself following Holmes as they made their way back to the Castle, their revolvers loaded in their pockets. The doctor had not been able to argue with his friend’s contention that thus far the locus of enigmas in Edinburgh was undoubtedly the Aery station, and thus .

In the uncertain hope of going unnoticed, they took a different route than they had that afternoon, walking up the straight lines of Canongate and then High Street to Castle Hill. The streets were empty, and they took consequent pains to go quietly; Watson could not help but draw a comparison with London to Edinburgh’s detriment, though judging cities based on the ease with which one could traverse them for semi-legal purposes seemed somewhat pernicious.

Ahead of him Holmes stopped abruptly, and Watson halted on the instant, as much feeling as seeing the other man in the darkness: there was a half-moon rising, but the light it cast was dim, and the gaslights were few and far between. He was dimly aware that they stood just by the mouth of one of the narrow closes, called wynds, that branched off from the main streets at irregular junctures.

“Watson,” Holmes whispered, low and urgent, “I think—“

And then, the sounds distinct in the still chill air, came the unmistakable sound of hammers being drawn back on revolvers, all around them.

Watson and Holmes drew and cocked their own revolvers immediately, but spot lanterns were flashed directly into their eyes before they could bring the guns to bear; Watson could not help but fling up an arm to block the stabbing light.

“How fortuitous,” a cool soprano voice observed, “or perhaps I ought to say, convenient: the men we go to abduct have the courtesy to walk straight into our arms. You are a credit to your sex, Dr. Watson, Mr. Holmes.”

Watson’s eyes had adjusted somewhat; he could make out Holmes lifting his revolver. “Hardly,” the detective countered; from his voice one would never know how they had been bested. “Given how easily you have ambushed us, that is.”

“Well, we may debate the truth at our leisure,” the woman replied, tone and words equally dismissive. “I trust, gentlemen, that you understand your situation.”

The threat was clear. “Yes,” Watson answered, because throwing their lives away here was no choice at all, and he was in no mood to risk Holmes’s theatrical flair. “I think we do.”

“Then in that case I shall ask for your revolvers, and your swordstick, Doctor.” She was standing directly in front of them by her voice, but there had to be at least half a dozen others in the rough circle.

“You have the advantage of us, mademoiselle,” Holmes observed, handing over his revolver, and a moment later the lanterns were lowered so that the light shone up into their faces. Watson, offering up his own gun, saw that their abductor was probably not as young as she looked in the dim glow.

“You have a point, Mr. Holmes,” she conceded, the light glinting on her golden hair when she nodded. “But I shall require your detection kit, and your swordstick, Doctor, all the same.”

She had a face possessed of more character than beauty, but had she not been holding them at gunpoint Watson should have called her pretty. As it was, he could not help but feel a certain amount of resentment towards her; Holmes’s face made no secret of his own irritation at his tool-kit having been observed and demanded. “This was presented to me to commemorate my service to Queen Charlotte in the Afghan Wars,” said Watson, handing his cane over with unfeigned reluctance as Holmes thrust the leather bundle at her. “I trust it shall be treated with honour.”

“As shall you yourselves, Doctor,” the woman said gravely, closing one hand around his swordstick and taking Holmes’s tool-kit in the other. At least, Watson was fairly sure, only he and Holmes knew how exposed each felt without their implements. “I promise you that, on my honour as a King’s officer.”

“A King’s officer?” Watson repeated dumbly, but of course it was no great surprise, though neither was it a great comfort, to be proven right in their suspicions.

“Indeed,” she agreed, and drew her straight spine up even straighter. “Commander Mary Morstan of His Majesty’s Airship _Eumelia_, at your service.”

Commander Mary Morstan tucked Watson’s swordstick under her arm while she spoke so that she could belt Holmes’s toolkit around her waist, over her uniform, and then fastened some sort of leather strap at both ends of the swordstick and slung it across her back like a claymore. She looked up towards the sky as she did so, which was fortunate in that it absolved both men of the obligation to reply; etiquette had no guidance to offer in this situation.

Gradually Watson became aware of that subliminal hum emanating from above them; he was not surprised to see a dark shape blotting out the stars over their heads, or that Morstan, working the lantern, exchanged a brief flurry of signals with it. His attempt to work out their meaning was not enough to distract him from the incipient dull throbbing in his leg; the night time chill was no help, either.

He did not think of it much any more, but there was a younger, entirely hale John Watson who had died on the field at Maiwand, and though these days he was fairly sure he had not liked the man much he did miss him, or more precisely his fully functional leg, on occasion. When a chain link ladder unrolled itself into the six-feet gap between him and Morstan, the doctor realized that this was very much one of those times.

By the lanternlight Morstan’s face was not unsympathetic, but it was unflinching. “Up,” she bade them, and they had no choice but to climb.


	4. The Skies

Airships routinely travelled at a height of several thousand feet above the ground, but to Watson’s relief they only climbed a few hundred feet up the ladder before Morstan halted above him and the ladder began to draw up beneath them, however ponderously. After a lengthy interval Watson chanced a look upward and saw the vast bulk of the airship swallowing them, a square of light picked out against the void of its underbelly. He was grateful when they were drawn over the lip of the hold and into that light, for at three thousand feet the wind drove cold knives through clothing and coats alike; the warmth was such that even sight of Morstan being met and formed up upon by yet more uniformed women with guns failed to move him.

“Welcome aboard the _Eumelia_, gentlemen,” Morstan said when Holmes had scrambled up behind them, nodding politely as though they were not being held against their will. He could see now that she was unquestionably pretty, if slightly firm-jawed, and in the brighter ship’s lighting Watson judged her age at perhaps six- or seven-and-twenty. She spoke with the precise intonation boarding schools pounded into their charges. “If you’ll follow me?”

She led them, not up and forward as Watson had expected, but aft through a series of corridors constructed of steel struts and girders, metal plating alternating with fine grating beneath their feet in sparse electric light, the bulbs exposed to the air. A faint odour of machine grease and ozone clung to everything, and the thrum of the engines hung underneath the level of conversation.

In the event, Morstan led them straight to the brig. There were no Marines in Aery service; a young but unruffled ginger sub-lieutenant snapped to attention when they entered, the light flashing off her polished boots and rifle-barrel. Morstan acknowledged her with a nod and lifted a ring of keys from a lobster-claw hook; one of the keys proved to open the barred door of the narrow cell at the end of the corridor.

Morstan gestured them inside, handing them leather gloves and high-collared coats as they did so. “You’ll want these,” she said, in a tone that brooked no argument, “and I advise you sincerely to share one of the bunks, or you may wake in the morning half-frozen.” Whether they did freeze or not was obviously a matter of extreme indifference to her, and Watson thought to himself spitefully that her nose was far too long for beauty.

Evidently Holmes too felt the need to voice some token protest. “This is most irregular, Commander Morstan,” he said, matching her indifference enough to sound bored. “I must insist that we be informed of the grounds upon which we are being deprived of our liberty.”

She smiled tightly. “Knowing too much, if I understand the captain correctly. Never fear, Mr. Holmes; her compliments, and you’ll have the honour of breaking your fast with her tomorrow morning. Until then, gentlemen, I bid you goodnight.”

Morstan shut and locked the ironwork door behind her, leaving the two men alone; the guard post was just out of sight down the narrow corridor. Holmes, doing up his coat buttons, gave him a shrug, but Watson’s reply was forestalled by a distinct jerk in the ship around them. The pitch of the engines changed; they were underway somewhere.

“London, I should think,” said Holmes, sounding grim, and Watson’s brain immediately presented him with a series of neat and hideous conclusions. He rather sank than sat on the edge of the bunk, which was as hard as he’d expected beneath its flannel covering.

“Treason, then,” he said, his voice sounding creaky in his own ears, and he winced at the sound.

“They’re hardly going to a garden party,” Holmes snapped, and Watson threw up his hands.

“Yes, obviously,” he snapped back. “But what is their—_her_—object? And what will she do to accomplish it?”

The detective let out an angry breath and flung himself down next to Watson, crossing his arms. “I do not know, Watson, but I know what I suspect: Countess Lovelace’s information bomb.” 

Chills were playing a ruthless solo on Watson’s cervical spine. “She said it had never been field-tested,” he pointed out, voice hollowing. “I suppose Captain King will take the opportunity to procure experimental results.”

“London would seem to present a perfect target,” Holmes agreed, in that detached tone which Watson did not usually envy; as a physician, he knew what it cost to maintain that sort of indifference. “This _Eumelia_ is a heavy cruiser, and the London station does not have enough ships of sufficient tonnage to best her. Should she make her threat clear, she can easily hold the entire capital hostage.”

The paucity of airships on station in the capital was entirely the fault of the paranoia of the Air Lords at Admiralty House; unlike the personnel they commanded, all of them were men. “What do you think she wants?” he asked again, and Holmes shrugged.

“I very much do not have enough data to theorize, mother hen,” he said. “I should think we’ll know after breakfast tomorrow, however.”

“Wonderful,” Watson sighed. “Breakfast with the treasonous, possibly insane woman who is presumably in sole command of a new weapon of unknown and potentially devastating power—just the thing to get one’s morning off on the right foot. Have I forgotten anything?”

“Treasonous, possibly insane woman in sole command of a new weapon with presumable intentions of laying waste to either the King, Parliament, London, or all three?” Holmes said, clarifying. “No, Watson, I don’t think you have.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Watson muttered, rather on general principles than for any particular reason. “Well, I suppose at the moment there’s nothing to do but sleep on it.”

“As always, Watson, your practical wisdom is astonishing.” But Holmes obediently arranged himself on the bunk next to his doctor nonetheless. Watson was careful about the placement of his hands beneath the rather thin blanket that improbably still smelled faintly of sheep, or perhaps that was merely his childhood memories of the country intruding. It would not do for whoever might observe them to get the wrong—or more precisely, the right—idea.

He would have wagered, given the situation in which they found themselves and the danger they knew London to be in, that he would have lain awake half the night. But in actuality, Holmes a warm presence beside him, he fell asleep within half an hour, the thrum of the _Eumelia_’s steam-powered engines surrounding them. 

It was just as well that he did fall asleep quickly, since he was awakened sharply by Holmes poking at him. “Watson,” the detective hissed. “Watson, wake up, I want you.”

Watson blinked, feeling his mind more sluggish than usual, and forced himself up onto his elbows. “Holmes, what?” The fact that they were imprisoned on an airship, hopefully still above Scotland, apparently had no material effect on the detective’s propensity for rousing him earlier than he desired.

“Quietly,” Holmes breathed, turning his head so that the tip of his nose brushed the edge of Watson’s ear. “But Watson, either we are not alone, or the crew are not to a woman behind King.”

“What makes you say that?” Watson whispered, moving his lips as little as possible. He lay back down on the bunk, and then beneath the blanket Holmes pressed something small and metallic into his hand. By its shape, Watson surmised that it was a lockpick that had originally begun its existence as something like a gear. “Holmes, how did you get this?”

“It was in my hand when I awoke ten minutes ago,” the detective explained, which Watson did not find reassuring.

“The ceiling?” he hazarded, looking up at the same. It looked a mass of pipes to him, none of sufficient size to admit even a woman’s smaller frame. But there was a narrow grate visible in it that might have been ajar.

“Immaterial at present,” said Holmes, and sat up, palming the lockpick off Watson in the same movement.

“What time is it?” Watson asked, doing likewise, and the detective pulled out his timepiece.

“Two minutes past six,” he answered, staring at its face as though the watch could reveal who their unknown benefactor was and how she—it had to be a she, in this place—had done it, and just then there came the unmistakable sound of booted feet tramping on metal grating.

 

When Commander Morstan presented herself at the door to their cell she found them both already awake and as presentable as they were going to be, Mr. Holmes seated on the edge of the bunk and Dr. Watson already standing, apparently doing his best to stretch his leg under the pretext of straightening his tie: she knew that look of concentrating on one’s body while pretending to attend to more social concerns, having worn it herself on more than one occasion.

At nearly seven-and-twenty Mary Morstan had served first her Queen and then her King for more than a decade; she knew herself, with no more pride than was deserved, to be a good officer, and she knew that her sister officers and the women they commanded generally thought the same of her. But as she and Victoria King had said to each other many times, was it right to think that was all they deserved? Were they not entitled to wider acknowledgment, or were they simply greedy, to be discontent?

It was hard for Mary herself to say; she had been discontent with her lot in life almost since she had become aware that she had one. The Aery came as close as anything ever had to satisfying her desires—and indeed, it fulfilled many she had not known she had, when she’d defied her mother’s wishes to join it—and for herself it was almost certainly folly to ask for more. But for the women with whom she had the privilege to serve, her sisters and lovers and mothers and aunts, she was prepared not simply to ask, but to demand.

For all these reasons she found it difficult, regarding the doctor and the detective, not to envy the perfect liberty with which they moved through their lives, never even apprehending the advantages with which society endowed them, advantages which were denied to Mary outright or for which she and her sister officers had to struggle ceaselessly. It had been too easy to respond with a careless quip to Holmes’s prating about their liberty the night before for just that reason. Too she found it difficult not to observe their companionship with a bitter tincture of yearning and envy, having once known something very like it herself: at the age of seventeen she had fallen entirely in love with her best friend, only to see Alice killed in the Second Afghan War.

The same war, in fact, that had robbed John Watson of the full use of his leg. They had that in common, Mary reflected, though she doubted that the doctor would ever know it, much less care.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” she said by way of announcement, and they both looked up, focusing their attention on her. Mary thought again how handsome they both were, in their different ways, Sherlock Holmes shorter and darker and disarmingly unflappable, John Watson taller and thinner and dangerously intense. Indeed, the weight of their simultaneous regard was palpable, but Mary knew how to bear such burdens, and she felt her spine straightening and her chin lifting infinitesimally in response.

“Captain King’s compliments, and she would appreciate the pleasure of your company for breakfast at seven,” she informed them. “In the meantime, there is something I should like you to see.”

Sub-lieutenant Doyle had been standing to one side, keys ready, and at Mary’s nod the younger woman stepped forward and unlocked the cell door. Holmes and Watson emerged with alacrity, but with suspicion unveiled on their faces.

“No handcuffs, Commander?” Holmes asked. His tone was too sharp to be arch, but there was something of that spirit in it nonetheless; she could not tell whether he was mocking her or himself, and chose to disregard it.

“Not unless you desire them, Mr. Holmes,” Mary replied, keeping her tone and her voice neutral, and deliberately turned her back on them to dismiss Doyle. “Thank you, Sub-lieutenant, that will be all,” she said formally, and Doyle saluted and let her superior officer and the two prisoners precede her up the passage out of the brig.

At the compartment door Mary turned and handed Dr. Watson the cane she had held tucked under her arm. “You may find this helpful, Doctor,” she informed him.

Watson took the cane automatically, but he was not quite able to keep his surprise out of his expression. Of course he would think her heartless. “Thank you, Commander,” he said; “you’re very kind.”

At least he had the tact not to inquire after her motivations. By chance Mary lifted her eyes to Sherlock Holmes, standing behind the doctor, and saw suspicion burning in the detective’s gaze; he knew that she was acting rather out of self-interest than kindness, and clearly wanted to know why.

Well, he could just wonder if he could not deduce her reasoning; she would reveal her motivations at the opportune moment, and not before. “Hardly, Doctor,” she said with brusque truth, and turned her back on them again to lead the way into the corridor. “Follow me.”

Like all imperial airships, _Eumelia_ was built to a semi-rigid design, containing two main decks within the hull and a third outside it, principally for weapons batteries. The brig was located in the centre aft of the lower interior deck, and Mary led them up the nearest ladder to the upper deck, the corridors of which were marginally wider but no less Spartan. The idea of an imperial airship service was perennially tossed around whenever enough Aery officers of a certain age congregated, and it was generally agreed that the upper deck of a _Queen Charlotte-_class could make excellent passenger accommodations, but no Aery woman had yet made good on the daydream.

A passenger vessel would have no need for the installation to which Mary intended to take her prisoners, however. Technically she was revealing military secrets simply by letting them out of the brig, but she had cleared her intentions with Captain King, and such small transgressions as giving them a de facto tour, in comparison with their ultimate designs, would soon be moot.

It was generally agreed that the fourth, “breeze” deck being directly accessible only by a double stairway running between the gasbags filling the ship’s interior represented a weak point in the class’s design, but the hard truth was that there was not really a better alternative. Mary took the most direct route to the nearest “attic” ladder, acknowledging the salutes of her subordinates only absently. The men’s reaction to her authority on the ship was lost to her.

Goggles were standard issue with all Aery uniforms except mess and ball dress (ball dress had only been introduced seven years prior, and only the most senior Aery officers had bothered to lay out the monies required for a uniform which they would almost certainly never be called upon to wear), it being generally supposed that mess and ball dress would only be worn on the ground; both uniforms were known colloquially as “prison garb.” Mary had her own pair of goggles at her belt, but there were spare pairs stored at points throughout the ship in case of unforeseen need, and she paused to make sure that Mr. Holmes and Doctor Watson each had a pair.

“You may keep these with you as long as you are onboard,” she told them. “You may leave your hats here, if you like; I cannot speak for the wind conditions up top.”

The two men exchanged speaking glances, though what they said was beyond her, and then Holmes gestured theatrically. “Lead on, Commander,” he bade her, and Mary shrugged; it was not her haberdasher’s bill at stake. There was a reason the Aery uniform caps were tightly fitted about the hairline.

They climbed the ladder to the “attic”, as it was informally called: the top of the interior decks formed a deck of its own, divided by the airship’s internal skeleton of girders and struts and the gasbags that ran between them, accessible for service and repair by a series of interior catwalks. They did not have to go far between the stiffly billowing gasbags, which were made of Italian silk and varnished with a mixture of bronze, graphite, iron, and aluminium, until they reached two spiral staircases ten feet apart: it was too great a height to the “roof” of the airship for a straight ladder to be safe.

“Ready, gentlemen?” Mary asked, but did not wait for a reply before ascending the up-stair. Her boots rattled on the metal grating, but the noise of their footsteps was at times lost between the snap of the gasbags and the noise of the wind over the airship’s exterior, as much felt in the air currents around them as heard. It was only about fifty degrees in here, and the roof deck was colder.

It was nearly one hundred feet to the roof; they made good time for a non-emergency, ascending to the top in about eight minutes. Mary gave them a minute to catch their breath, tactfully not looking at them, and then unsealed the hatch.

The wind smacked her full in the face as it always did, whipping at the few strands of hair not captured in her braid, but the _Eumelia_ was holding station above Arthur’s Seat and the air was actually fairly calm. Mary closed the hatch beneath Dr. Watson; the two men were too caught up in the panorama encompassing them to take a precaution to which they were not habituated.

And indeed, the view was breathtaking. Edinburgh and Scotland spread out beneath them, with the Firth and the North Sea sparkling on the horizon just below the rising sun; at this height it was possible to make out Glasgow in the western distance, its towers dark against the swiftly lightening indigo of the terminator. Mary saw unfeigned delight on Dr. Watson’s face, and a more grudging amazement masked in Sherlock Holmes’s expression, and very carefully kept her smile to herself. She had never yet met any one, man or woman, who could resist the sheer grandeur of the skies, and she took real joy in sharing it with everyone she could.

Mary acknowledged the salutes of the two cloud janes on duty in the fore and aft crow’s nests, as they were still called, while she led the two men in a circuit around the narrow ovoid of the top deck between the gun emplacements. It was not possible to behold the ground directly beneath them, but at the ends more could be seen.

They remained up top for nearly ten minutes,  and once back inside the _Eumelia_’s interior Mary removed her goggles and gave the two men an unguarded grin. “What did you think, gentlemen?” she asked, because she wanted to know their reactions.

“Amazing,” Watson told her sincerely; already she was not surprised that Holmes expressed no such enthusiasm.

 “I begin to see why you have chosen to lead the life you do, Commander,” he said, and then put a hand inside his overcoat, digging around in the jacket he wore beneath that. The object he pulled out was so unfamiliar on an airship that it took Mary an instant to recognize it as a clay pipe; her reaction once she did was immediate and violent.

“No!” she shouted, springing forward and seizing Holmes’s pipe within his hand, her other hand gripping his lapel as she brought her forearm up to pressure his windpipe.

The detective’s eyes were wide but focused entirely on her, and Mary became aware as she forced her breathing back to a normal rate of the tension in his body, palpable across the short distance between them. She realized he was weighing whether to start a fight with her here at the same time that she took a very deliberate step back.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Holmes,” she said quietly. “Smoking is not allowed aboard Aery vessels. We no longer use hydrogen, but as you see, the prohibition is drilled into us regardless.”

“Of course, Commander,” said Holmes, still staring at her. “I trust I may keep my pipe on the condition that I not light it?”

“Certainly,” said Mary, trying to sound as though she were granting a concession. “But be careful of your lucifers.” She turned and took the down-stair, aware that behind her the two men were re-evaluating her based on her reaction. 

They had lingered long enough on the roof deck that by the time they made their way to the foot of the down-stair and thence back to the main deck they had just enough time to make their way forward to the captain’s cabin.

Victoria King was seated at the dining table in the day cabin, which was set for four with the ship’s best plate on a snowy linen tablecloth. The captain’s steward, Jenny Baker, was just setting a full coffee service on the table in front of her, and King looked up at them as they entered, Mary bracing to attention just inside the door.

“Mary, Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson,” King greeted them, nodding with the negligent tolerance of a ship’s commander. “At ease, Mary. Gentlemen, I trust your stay with us so far has not been too trying? Please,” she said before anyone could answer, “sit down; you must be famished.”

Holmes and Watson exchanged another of those speaking looks, then took the places at the foot of the table and at King’s left hand respectively; Mary sat opposite from Watson. Baker knew how she took her coffee, with cream but no sugar, and ostentatiously served the first officer second after the captain, ignoring their “guests.” Mary hid a smile behind her cup; no one was a greater partisan of the Aery and its female personnel than Chief Steward Jenny Baker.

Despite the beauty of the day outside the leaded windowpanes and the sunlight filling the positively luxuriously appointed cabin, which was carpeted in the Service’s emerald green, it was rather a subdued meal. Aery etiquette was not so iron-clad as the Navy’s; usually officers conversed freely without regard for rank, but Mary could not very well start a conversation that excluded her captain, and Sherlock Holmes, who ate lightly, was tight-lipped. She found herself exchanging glances with Dr. Watson; at one point he even gave her a tiny but unmistakable grin. Doubtless under the influence of victuals he had forgotten himself.

“Well,” King said at last, after Baker had cleared their plates away, refilled their coffee cups, and withdrawn, “I should think you two gentlemen are wondering why I ordered my first officer to abduct you last night.”

“Actually,” said Holmes, regarding King with fundamental disinterest, “I was wondering whether you plan to assassinate His Majesty directly, or simply to take up station over Parliament and dictate your terms.”

“Neither, in point of fact,” said King, looking amused. “Though I am impressed, Mr. Holmes, that you seem to have deduced the fundamental elements of my grand plan.”

“Well, let me see,” Holmes countered. The sunlight reflected off a mirror to one side of the compartment, revealing his eyes to be a dark liquid brown rather than the black they usually appeared. “You will take Countess Lovelace’s information bomb south, overwhelm London’s defences, and commit treason. Have I overlooked anything of importance?”

“I think I have already committed treason, according to a strict interpretation of regulations.” Victoria King sat unmoved by the famed Sherlock Holmes’s flaying tongue, and watching her captain Mary Morstan felt again how much she loved this woman, knew again as she had from the first hour she’d come aboard _Eumelia_ that she would gladly die with her and for her.

The emotion made the knowledge of what she would soon do all the more intolerable. And yet, she knew herself, and her own indomitable will; she would act in accordance with her own decisions.

“Does Countess Lovelace know of your intentions, Captain?” Dr. Watson asked quietly. His eyes were an electric shade of blue in the morning sun, and Mary reminded herself that being infatuated with the surgeon was the mark of an inexperienced officer.

Still, there was no harm in spectatorship; she might as well derive what benefit she could from this farrago of deceptions before its inevitable denouement.

“No, Doctor, Countess Lovelace is as innocent as a woman whose inventions have yielded the military victories hers have can be,” King was saying. “Which is to say, I am certain she sleeps the sleep of the just; she came to Edinburgh under legitimate terms. Appropriating the information bomb is entirely my idea.”

“Hence the countess not scrupling to show it off to us,” said Watson; “and thus were our fates sealed, I take it?”

“I told you six years ago that you two were the most dangerous men in London, Doctor,” King replied, speaking with deliberation. “That has not changed, as you yourselves have not. I tried to make allies of you; having failed, I could not risk your being free to somehow thwart my plans.”

“Of course not,” the doctor muttered into his cup, his tone subtly sarcastic, and with a palpable start Mary recognized the bleak humour she knew from her fellow Aery women. Perhaps the other branches of the Service were not so different after all.

Holmes was sitting back in his chair, his eyes glittering. “I do wonder, Captain King, just what a queen’s granddaughter believes she can gain through violence that she cannot gain through her position, and persuasion.”

Victoria King’s royal parentage was an open secret in the Aery, and not much of a secret at all in wider society, and the airship captain actually laughed out loud. It was an Aery laugh, full-bodied and unconstrained; Mary herself chuckled a little. “If you do not know the advantages of violence by now, Mr. Holmes, you may never understand,” King said when she had leashed her mirth, though she still smiled. “As for what I hope to gain, well, there are things that I alone may accomplish, and I have a responsibility to use the advantages which my _illegitimate_ birth has given me.”

“Responsibility?” Holmes repeated, and Mary watched him closely, wondering to herself behind her best officer’s face whether he would actually be able to deduce the full truth. Captain King had not been lying when she had said that Lady Ada had come to Edinburgh for legitimate purposes, but she had not said that the scientist-countess’s legitimate purpose had not been the information bomb.

“Indeed,” said King, refusing to be drawn, and though Mary was conscious of the doctor’s scrutiny she kept her eyes on the detective, who had evidently decided to hoard his suspicions until such time as he could reveal them to full effect. There was more than a little of the actor in Sherlock Holmes, that much was clear. “Suffice it to say, Mr. Holmes, that I have a grievance to present to the King, and I do not think he shall hear it unless it is accompanied by the sound of the _Eumelia_’s engines, and her guns.”

Mary glanced at Dr. Watson, and saw him frown; he had to be remembering the carnage the Aery had wreaked on the Afghan countryside, the results of which he had seen first-hand before becoming a casualty himself. You had to be a lunatic or a fool to wish such scenes repeated anywhere, much less in the capital of the empire.

Which unequivocal fact said some highly uncomplimentary things about Victoria King and Mary Morstan. Mary drank more of her coffee rather than sigh like a milkmaid over the hard truths of their position; the relative freedom they enjoyed in the Aery came at a steep price, both in terms of what they were expected to do and in what they could not expect to enjoy.

That it was a price she paid willingly, every day, was not always a comfort.

“Even were the truth of your parentage not bandied about in the ha’penny press, Captain, I should have deduced it simply by your fallacious belief in the potential efficacy of a single person,” Holmes said, his voice cold; “it is the fantasy of all monarchists. But we are not governed by a king here in Britain.”

King met his stare levelly, her hazel eyes flat and hard; Mary recognized that look as the one her captain wore into battle. “No,” she agreed after a moment, “but here above Britain my word is law. Thank you for your time, gentlemen, and I do apologize for the inconvenience. We will be departing for London later today, and in the meantime Commander Morstan will show you back to your…accommodations.”

Mary heard the command in her captain’s words and stood, leaving her coffee half-finished on the table. “Captain,” she said, nodding to King before turning to Holmes and Watson, who were getting to their feet with expressions of dangerous calm and open anger, respectively. “Gentlemen,” she said politely, gesturing for them to precede her out of the compartment.

Out in the corridor Mary gave both men her best quelling look; twenty feet off the bridge was not the place to discuss anything of consequence, and she could see that the doctor at least thought he wanted to say something. Instead she led them to the nearest down-ladder; on Aery ships the highest-ranking officer always ascended or descended first, and an airwoman stood out of the way to let them precede her.

The lower deck had exterior windows in only two cabins, and after the comparative brightness of the upper deck its electric lighting seemed positively stygian. Mary waited for the two men to descend the ladder, affecting not to notice the doctor’s wincing when he stepped onto the decking. The roof was a long climb even for the halest woman.

Rather than allow her two prisoners to seize the conversational initiative, however, she turned to face them and said without preamble, “I take it you presume to express an opinion on our actions, sirs?”

Both men regarded her levelly; Holmes’s expression a pleasant mask, the surgeon’s much less placid. “I don’t know what you believe to be at stake here, Commander, so I cannot say whether your wager is reasonable,” Dr. Watson told her. His voice was mild, but those blue eyes were snapping with anger. “But I can tell you now that whatever it is, it is not worth anyone’s life.”

Mary regarded him for a long moment, it dawning slowly on her that John Watson clearly had a temper, as well as a passion for justice; once won, she thought, his loyalty would be unswerving, and she carefully hid an unreasonable flash of envy for Sherlock Holmes. What could she do, with loyalty like that?

She could emulate Victoria King in truth, and not in ideal, just to start. “Nonetheless we have staked our lives, our careers, and our very honour in this venture, Doctor,” she replied. “Whatever the result, our intentions are lofty. Remember that.”

No one said anything to that, for which Mary was selfishly grateful, although Sherlock Holmes did turn to her as she was heaving closed the door to their cell. “We are told that Captain King has a great reputation in the Aery,” he remarked, utterly careless. “Is it true?”

“We would follow her into Hell,” Mary said with total candour, “to a woman.”

Holmes had his pipe clenched in his teeth already, and he nodded at her answer, clearly slotting it into some data-edifice in his mind; he reminded her in some ways of Ada Lovelace, thoughts continually pre-occupied with processes too complicated to explain. Dr. Watson was already sitting on the bunk, his hands on his knees. “Good day then, gentlemen,” Mary said, and turned the key in the lock and left them there. She was due to stand watch on the bridge in two bells.

 

“Well,” said Holmes when Morstan’s footsteps had faded, “what do you think of that, Watson?”

The doctor was silent for several minutes. “They are either the most reasonable lunatics or the most crazed officers I have ever met,” he answered at last, and Holmes was selfishly glad to hear the wonderment he himself had suppressed underlying his tone. Watson looked up at him. “They have not told us everything, you know.”

“Yes, mother hen, I did rather deduce that,” said Holmes, giving full rein to his sarcasm, though Watson pointedly ignored it.

“Did you also deduce Captain King’s real goal?” he asked instead, amusement threading through his voice.

The detective had anticipated this question, but unhappily his answer had not changed. “No,” he said shortly.

Watson made an acknowledging noise, stretching out his legs. “Well, old cock, we’re in a prime position to solve the mystery sooner or later,” he said, sounding almost cheerful. “In light of the fact that we are the only two people who know of its existence, that is.”

Holmes was looking up at the ceiling. “Ah,” he said, “but there’s where you’re wrong, mother hen.”

The doctor frowned; Holmes could hear it in his voice, and picture it on his face, without needing to confirm it visually. “Holmes, what—“

“He means me, Doctor,” a low female voice said, and then the metal grate at which Holmes was staring heaved fully aside and a slim, almost boyish figure dropped to the deck legs first, landing in a crouch. After a moment the woman straightened, and Holmes immediately recognized the famed—the infamous—contralto Irene Adler, standing between them in an airwoman’s dull olive uniform. Clearly his assessment of her had been missing some crucial details.

“Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson,” Adler greeted them, her quiet tone not enough to mask the melodious quality of her trained voice. Her flat American accent, however, was far more pronounced in speech than in song, just as her pale brown skin looked darker out of the stage lighting. “A pleasure to meet you both, may I say.”

She leaned forward, reaching out one graceful hand, and Holmes clasped the proffered appendage automatically, still sorting through his own reactions. He already knew that he was not as surprised as his doctor; but why?

“It is an honour to meet you, Miss Adler,” he said while he though; the hand that held his was callused and strong beneath soft skin. “And may I say, quite aside from the fact that I found your interpretation of Rossini stunning, that I never thought we might meet like this.”

If Irene Adler perceived his irony as an attack, she nonetheless held her fire. “Did you not?” she asked, raising one dark, fine eyebrow, and then she turned to Watson. “Doctor,” she greeted him; Watson actually raised her hand to his lips.

“Miss Adler,” said Holmes’s physician, with admirable aplomb; the detective checked a wholly frivolous smile. “Forgive my rudeness, but what on earth is a coloratura contralto doing here? And what about the guard?”

Adler grimaced. Now that she was in the cell with them Holmes recognized the scent of the Parisian perfume that clung to her; like the few other cloud janes they’d passed on the _Eumelia_, she had her thick dark hair drawn back in a braid down her back beneath a dark green cap. She was no less beautiful for it; indeed, the canny cast of her features was somewhat unnerving.

“I have taken care of the guard, for a brief interval,” she replied, clearly speaking of a trifle with which they ought not concern themselves; “we have a little time to confer. As for what I am doing here, gentlemen, my errand is the same as yours: Victoria King has something I want, and I came here to obtain it.”

“But you aren’t going to tell us what that is,” Watson said before the detective could reply; it was somewhat disorienting to hear him using the same subtle sarcasm on Adler that he normally reserved for the detective.

Adler only smiled, the expression as thin and sharp as a stiletto. “Forgive a lady her secrets, Doctor.” She straightened a little, planting her feet, and said soberly, “We are wasting time we do not have, gentlemen; _Eumelia_ is already bound for London. Mr. Holmes, can you pick that lock?” She nodded toward the cell door, making her referent clear.

In lieu of immediate reply Holmes cast a re-appraising glance up at the ceiling, but Adler noticed the slight gesture and correctly divined its meaning. “The serviceways are very carefully scaled to women,” she explained; “Doctor Watson is far too tall and you, Mr. Holmes, too broad in the shoulders.”

To say nothing of the fact that the requisite exertion would burden Watson’s leg unduly; they needed his full strength for the last act. “I assume you have more lockpicks,” he said to Adler, and she nodded, putting one hand up to her air and swiftly producing two more picks. Holmes took the little metal tools and tucked them into his jacket, missing again his detecting kit. He ought to have asked Morstan about it, if only to catalogue her reaction. She was a fascinating woman, even had she not possessed an alarming amount of control over their present circumstances.

“And what, pray, are we to do once we have made our clever escape?” Watson wanted to know.

Adler shrugged, the gesture somehow very American. Holmes and the doctor were old enough to remember when she would have been a mere colonial, a Continental, but it was doubtful that Adler’s memory went back quite that far. Nevertheless, the last word he should use to describe her was ‘young;’ if anything, her unflappable competence was uncanny.

Uncanny, and at the same time not unfamiliar. The detective let his mind put together the pieces of what he already knew while Adler spoke. ”The ideal would be to get the information bomb off the ship, of course,” she admitted, “but the emergency gliders have no intrinsic lift; they would crash on the instant under its weight. We shall have to settle for dismantling the bomb before King can make good on her threat to use it.”

Watson’s eyes narrowed. “And which of us, pray, knows how to do that?”

Adler hesitated. “I made a thorough study of Countess Lovelace’s diagrams last night,” she said after a moment. “Between the three of us, we should be able to devise at least a crude method.” She looked back at Watson, chin tilted up in an obvious challenge. “If either of you have another suggestion, gentlemen, please, feel free to divulge it.”

Holmes glanced at Watson, and the other man looked back, a subtle tightening of his lips confirming what they both already knew: their options were paltry and constrained. Irene Adler was clearly more than what she seemed, but in the midst of the monstrous service they had little choice but to trust some woman, however provisionally.

It was of course possible, perhaps even probable, that she intended to betray them, but the same habitual antipathy between the two sides of the Atlantic that animated Watson’s scowl augured against it, and Holmes was confident that he could factor Adler’s ulterior motives into his calculations with relative ease. The challenge lay, as ever, in translating apprehension of the facts into action based upon them.

“I think not,” Holmes replied after a moment, turning his neck and craning his head to peer up the corridor toward the guard post. The angles were not propitious; he could see only an immobile patch of emerald at the corner of his vision. What had Adler done to their guard?

“Then we are as prepared as we may be, I think,” she said, a certain grim edge to her tone. “If you gentlemen make your escape when Captain King sounds general quarters, that ought to be sufficient. The bomb is on the lowest deck; we can rendezvous there.” As an afterthought, she added, “Try to find weapons along your way.”

“We shall keep that in mind,” Watson said, the words etched in acid, though Holmes doubted Adler heard the sarcasm in the doctor’s tone.

“Good.” If she did perceive Watson’s distrust—and Holmes made a point never to underestimate the people he encountered; it was inconceivable that she did not perceive it—Adler nonetheless made no sign. “In that case, I shall see you shortly. Mr. Holmes, if you would be so kind?”

The opera singer cast a very pointed look first at him and then at the ceiling, and Holmes realized abruptly that he was meant to assist her.

He knew that they all knew that Adler had made the request of him to spare Watson’s leg, but that fact did nothing to restrain Watson’s evident amusement even as it prevented Holmes from somehow dodging her request, etiquette be damned. He knew better than to trust her; just like Mary Morstan and Victoria King, Irene Adler was playing a game of her own.

Still, there was nothing for it. The detective adopted a martyred expression and, standing beneath the open grate, laced his fingers together so that Adler could put one hand on his shoulder and one foot in his hands and then heave herself up his body when he lifted her; he had a brief impression of warmth and Parisian perfume. When she pulled herself up into the piping Holmes looked up to watch her for as long as he could, pretending to check that the grate was flush with the aperture when she replaced it. She was evidently stronger than she looked.

Feeling the tension of a chase draining out of him, he let himself sag back onto the other bunk opposite Watson, who met his eyes but held his silence until several minutes had passed by his timepiece, the heavy gold watch that he had inherited from his father by way of his drunkard brother. Holmes had nursed his curiosity about Watson’s family for years, but they had all died while he’d waited for the opportune moment. It didn’t stop him from wondering idly whether Watson’s brother had been to him anything like what Mycroft was to Holmes himself. The evidence indicated a decided ‘no.’

Watson levered himself upright, having shut and pocketed his watch. “Now,” he said thoughtfully, “what does a woman like that want with the plans for Countess Lovelace’s information bomb?”

But Holmes had finally synthesized the conclusion from the uncategorized data in his brain, and he found that he knew the answer to the doctor’s question. “I trust, Watson, that you noticed the citrine diamond she wore, in the theatre?” he asked rhetorically. “Until late last year it belonged to the dewan of Travancore.”

Watson quirked an eyebrow. “Proof, Holmes?”

“None,” the detective admitted. “But if I had access to my files, Watson, I could show you an entire string of crimes committed by this Adler around the world.”

The doctor looked sceptical, but elected not to press the issue. “And the information bomb?”

“The plans for even a failed prototype would be worth a great deal of money to a certain class of criminal,” Holmes said, not quite able to keep his tone from sobering.

“The rich and powerful kind, I take it?”

“The intelligent kind,” Holmes answered, but his thoughts had already drifted back to Adler. “Really, Watson, you must admit that it is quite brilliant—her opera career affords her an impeccable excuse to travel freely, at odd intervals.”

“And to engage in behaviours that might otherwise raise more than eyebrows,” said Watson shrewdly. 

“Precisely,” he agreed. “Really, Watson, consider—what could make her do it? To set that talent at hazard, for such paltry gain—“

“Holmes, you still don’t understand gambling.” Watson rolled his eyes. “I hope you do realize that you are attracted to Irene Adler?”

“Attracted?” Holmes repeated; there was no need to feign his indignation. “Watson, do you hear what you are saying? Irene Adler is a criminal, and besides—“ Abruptly, the words fled; he shut his mouth and could not continue. _Besides_, he said in his mind and in his eyes, looking at his doctor, _no one is worth risking you._

Even after seven years, it was still faintly unnerving to be known so well; comforting too, of course. Watson merely smiled at him, one of those gentle unreserved smiles that broke Holmes’s heart every time. He knew he did not deserve the other man, whatever Watson himself might say; the doctor had no objectivity where he, Holmes, was concerned. “You do realize that I would not mind,” he said quietly. “I do not think anyone could change what we are to each other, Holmes; do you?”

“No,” Holmes whispered, staring at the decking under Watson’s shoes. “No, Watson, I don’t.”

Which was simply another way of saying, in less obvious words, that he, Holmes, was deeply and irrevocably in love with his flatmate. Why it was still so difficult to say baldly was a riddle Holmes had never solved to his own satisfaction, though his provisional conclusion involved the fact that he was at heart a scoundrel and a fool.

“Good,” said Watson, and actually poked at Holmes’s leg with his replacement cane. “Don’t take on so, Holmes. I love you, and we both know that you know it, and that I could not stop even should I desire to do so, which I do not and never shall.” He shot Holmes another teasing glance, perfectly calibrated. “Even should you have an affair with an opera singer.”

“How terribly clichéd,” said Holmes, hoping to convey his utter disinterest. But the next words from his quick tongue betrayed him. “Why a woman like that should have any interest in me I have not the slightest idea.”

“Well, whatever her motives, I think she does,” said Watson.

“Watson, I intend no insult, but you are not unbiased in the matter,” Holmes countered, and then finally hit on an offensive. “And if Irene Adler has an unnatural interest in _me_, Commander Morstan seems positively fixated on _you_.”

“’Fixated’ is rather a strong word,” the doctor said mildly; evidently he had noticed Morstan’s frequent and forward scrutiny. Well, he was a highly intelligent man; that was part of why Holmes loved him.

“It’s not that I cannot see the attraction, on both sides,” Holmes continued, ignoring Watson’s attempt to defuse the conversation. “I do believe that Mary Morstan could be a force in her own right, were she not so firmly decided on treason. Don’t you think it would be interesting, Watson, to have her assistance on a case?”

The doctor rolled his eyes. “Very likely we should all get ourselves killed, should it come to that.”

“And you a gambling man,” said Holmes, with perfectly pitched disappointment.

“Part of gambling is knowing which wagers are safe bets, Holmes.” Whereupon Watson crossed his legs at the ankles and leaned back into the wall, closing his eyes, leaving Holmes to gaze his fill upon him before the detective, too, decided that, before foiling treason, sleep might not be untoward. Holmes knew his limits; he could unquestionably do everything circumstances required just as he was, and more exhausted. But skulduggery on an airship had a certain novelty value, if nothing else, and he wanted to be in full command of his faculties for it.

 

On _Eumelia_’s bridge that afternoon Mary, at the appointed time, gave the orders to plot a course for London. Having checked navigator Lieutenant Catherine Hyde’s work at the chart table herself, she read it out to the helmswoman and ordered the engine room to lay on full military power.

The women on the bridge traded glances at their stations while the _Eumelia_ fell up and away from the earth below, peeling off from her appointed patrol area over the Firth. From the centre chair Mary kept a discreet eye upon them; Captain King had informed the crew that they were to conduct an unannounced test of the capital’s defences. With any luck no one would suspect anything until the ruse was nearly finished, but she would have wagered the crew of the _Eumelia_ against any company in any of the other branches of the service, and she knew better than to plan on them remaining blissfully ignorant.

Still, there was only so much she could do about it before it happened, and she knew from experience that it was better to think of other things while she could, before the engagement required her total focus. So Mary watched out the forward port-glass, its trapezoidal panels soldered into one great window nearly eight feet in diameter, as Scotland diminished beneath them, savouring as she always did the sense of _Eumelia_ and her crew as one great machine that was more than the sum of its flesh and clockwork and blood and steam components, with herself temporarily at its centre. It was a heady feeling, to be sure, like drinking just enough champagne.

They were somewhere over the north of England when Hyde said quietly behind her, “Captain on the bridge,” and Mary rose before she had even consciously understood the words, turning to see Captain Victoria King standing to one side of the command deck, having just stepped down from the cramped bridge’s upper riser.

“Captain,” Mary greeted her, bracing to attention.

“Commander Morstan,” King replied, just the ghost of a smile softening the formality of her tone. She glanced around the bridge, taking in the green-clad women staffing it, and then met her executive officer’s eyes. “I have the bridge,” she said, and Mary nodded.

“You have the bridge, sir,” she acknowledged, and moved to stand at the rail, taking up her customary place there.

“What’s our time to London, Mary?” King asked as she sat down in the stiff-framed command chair, and Mary consulted her timepiece, running a series of calculations through her mind.

“Approximately ninety-four minutes, Captain, assuming this headwind doesn’t pick up,” she replied after a moment, and then looked up from the watch’s face to meet King’s eyes. “We should be in time to have a late supper at Buckingham Palace,” she added, unable to resist the rather dangerous, if subtle, joke.

King raised one brown eyebrow. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Commander,” she said reprovingly, but of course both women knew the captain was at best obfuscating.

“Of course not, sir,” Mary murmured; “my apologies.”

King’s lips quirked before she turned to regard the view before and beneath them along with her first officer. A railway could be seen beneath them, and every so often a locomotive at the head of a train upon it. Though not Scottish herself, Mary had spent nearly her entire life on the ground since the age of sixteen in Edinburgh, and she had absorbed something of the Scottish ambivalence towards the southern realm on the island.

It was quiet on the bridge; aside from King, Hyde, and Mary herself the only other women in it were the helmswoman and the communications officer, whose job it was to coordinate the passage of messages through the ship both by speaking tube and by hand if necessary. As first officer, Mary was responsible for coordinating the weapons crews during engagements, as well as liaising with the engineers at all times, to say nothing of her most important task, that of forming her captain’s first critic and last friendly ear, as well as her vital link with the rest of the crew.

They were perhaps sixty minutes from London when King turned toward her. “Commander Morstan, sound general quarters.”

“Sir,” Mary said, and nodded to the communications officer, Annabelle Pitt. “General quarters, Lieutenant,” she ordered, and Pitt nodded.

“General quarters, aye, sir,” she acknowledged, and turned the heavy metal wheel, painted a dull yellow, that sat at the left end of her station. The wheel caught with an audible clank, and several things happened at once: throughout the ship, spring-loaded bells began to jangle, harsh and loud, and the lighting on the bridge switched seamlessly from general to spot lights above every station. In the corridors, red lights had lit up when the general lighting was extinguished.

The atmosphere on the bridge did not so much sharpen as hone itself; the bridge officers were seasoned professionals and it was not quite tension, not yet. After a moment Captain King turned in her chair slightly and said, her voice pitched deliberately low to fly under the noise of the quarters alert, “Mary, hadn’t you better…?” with a significant glance up-deck.

Of course there were no verbal orders given, and none would be, the better to deny everything at the board of inquiry—or court martial, depending on how this insane venture turned out. Mary saluted, drawing herself up to full attention. “Captain,” she said, the word so much more than an acknowledgment, and King nodded, not looking away from her eyes.

“Commander Morstan,” she said formally, and Mary left the bridge and her captain behind her, not glancing back until she had shut the door to the compartment firmly.

Once in the corridor Mary allowed herself thirty seconds to put her head down and breathe as though she’d just taken the stairs to the roof deck at a dead run, but even thirty seconds felt indulgent by the time they had ticked away. Mary tucked her timepiece back into her uniform coat (fifty-seven minutes) and set off down the corridor, making sure her officer’s face was firmly set.

She took the nearest stair to the lower deck at the greatest speed which would not raise suspicion; the quarters alert died away, the tension of the bells’ springs fully released, just when she set her feet on the decking of the corridor. Mary headed for the brig, part of her mind noting as always how the ship hummed with purpose, almost audible alongside the perpetual dull thrum of the engines. She found it hard to sleep without both surrounding her.

Sub-Lieutenant Doyle was on duty again, and she saluted smartly when Mary entered the compartment. “Commander Morstan, sir,” she said, and Mary nodded.

“At ease, Sub-Lieutenant,” she said by way of greeting; “how goes it?”

Doyle shrugged. “Nothing to report since I came on shift an hour ago, sir. They’re a quiet pair, if I may say so.”

“Yes, Doyle, you may,” Mary said absently. “I’ll require your keys, Sub-Lieutenant; the prisoners are to accompany me to the bridge.”

“Sir.” Doyle handed over the heavy ring of keys without further comment; a sub-lieutenant was as like to question a commander as the earth was to be orbited by the sun.

“Thank you,” Mary said; she made it a point to be courteous. It was just as well she had been courteous, she thought when she stepped down the corridor and saw Sherlock Holmes with his hands through the bars of his cell door, two lockpicks inserted carefully into the mechanism. He looked up and met her eyes with utter composure; behind him on one of the bunks John Watson’s face was set into unsurprised lines.

“What in God’s name are you _doing_?” Mary hissed, immediately stepping close to the bars to hide Holmes’s hands from Doyle’s view.

“Attempting to pick this lock, Commander, what does it look like?” The detective sounded bored, but she could perceive his intense focus in the way he kept probing at the lock, his hands inches from her uniform coat.

“We had planned on escaping,” Watson explained, with heavy irony.

“I can see _that_,” Mary snapped. “But why?”

“To foil Captain King’s plan, and yours, Commander,” the doctor replied, Holmes evidently having lapsed into silence. “Once we escaped, we were to proceed to the gundeck and disable the information bomb.”

His tone made it clear that it was the only possible answer to her question, hardly worthy of question at all. “It wouldn’t have worked,” Mary told him, pettily glad. “Half of the information bomb is on the roof deck, and both halves must be disabled to prevent the bomb’s operation. Here, Mr. Holmes, allow me,” she said, and put her hands over his, detaching his fingers from the lockpicks and removing the lockpicks from the lock. “May I ask where you obtained these?” she asked, holding them up to scrutinize them. The workmanship was unfamiliar, but then, she was hardly a connoisseur.

“You may,” Holmes muttered, with ill grace.

“It is not our secret to tell,” Watson offered, sounding genuinely apologetic, which most likely augured for Mary having hearing problems.

“Wonderful,” she said shortly, and then forced herself to consider, not merely react. “Still, gentlemen,” she told them, looking up, “your basic strategy remains sound; it is the tactics that we must alter. Once I walk you past Sub-Lieutenant Doyle, we shall have to split up; there are only forty-odd minutes remaining until we reach London. I believe I shall be needed on the roof deck, to countermand their standing orders. You two may proceed to the gundeck in accordance with your original plan.”

They were both staring at her, and Mary allowed a flash of annoyance to break through her façade, a lighthouse beacon showing through fog. “You didn’t really think I would stand by while Captain King forswore herself and endangered the crown I swore to protect, did you?” she asked, less because she did not know the answer than because she derived a certain childish pleasure from the astonishment they were not quite expressing.

“On the contrary, Commander, we did,” said Holmes, his bluntness so blatant that he had to be attempting to irk her.

Mary refused to be drawn, however, particularly not under the current circumstances. “I suppose I gave you sufficient evidence to support such a conclusion,” she allowed, permitting her lips to shape a very small smile. “But surely we can agree that the deception was essential?”

“Just as surely as we can agree that we have no choice but to trust you now,” Holmes agreed, his dark eyes glowing with an emotion Mary recognized: the ugly but undeniable thrill of battle.

“Precisely,” she said. “If I am lying, you wind up in handcuffs either way, but if I am telling the truth, we may both accomplish our ends.”

No one said anything for almost a full minute: Holmes was staring at her as though she were some bizarre creature unknown to science, while Watson appeared to be deep in thought. But then the doctor stood up, saying, “If we only have forty minutes, Commander, that does not leave much time,” and Holmes seemed to rouse himself.

There had to be less solid foundations for alliances of convenience in history, but at the moment she could think of none, and did not care. “Come along, then,” said Mary, and unlocked their cell door. The two men followed her up the short corridor to the guard station, where Doyle was standing politely. “Handcuffs, please, Sub-Lieutenant,” Mary said, and the doctor and the detective obediently held out their wrists to her, Watson looking put-upon and Holmes looking like he knew more than he was letting on. He probably did, at that; Mary reminded herself that it would be foolish to underestimate him just because she had the upper hand for the time being.

Mary signed for her two prisoners’ personal effects and they trooped obediently into the corridor, which fortunately was deserted; Mary immediately headed forward, and opened the door for them to precede her into the armoury a minute or so later.

The armoury was the name given to a rather small, closet-like compartment in which the small arms for boarding parties and defence against boarding parties were stored when the ship was not in action. Under other circumstances it was the last place Mary would think to hide anyone, but she was fairly certain that there would be no call for personal combat today, or that if there were it would come after her two fugitives had vacated the compartment.

“Give me your wrists, Mr. Holmes,” she told the detective, who rolled his eyes but did as she said with a theatrical sigh.

Mary unlocked his cuffs with her master key and then turned to Watson, who already had his arms extended and was smiling faintly. She almost did not feel Holmes liberating his detective kit from its place about her waist, but only almost.

In the interim too she had decided how to handle him; every performer longed for an appreciative audience. So Mary reached her left hand across her body and gripped his fingers where they had just undone the kit’s buckle and, turning slightly, gave him an appraising look. “Very nice, Mr. Holmes,” she said archly. “Would you like your revolver as well?”

Holmes met her eye with an innocent expression. “It might come in handy,” he allowed, and Mary took the two guns from where she had thrust them into her uniform belt, handing Watson’s battered Army revolver to him with her right hand and giving Holmes back his much newer firearm with her left. Stepping back, she removed the leather carrying strap from Watson’s swordstick and returned that to him as well, two-handed as befit its being awarded by the late Queen.

“Thank you, Commander,” said Watson, tucking the stick under his arm while he glanced around. “Were you and Captain King planning on a private _war_, Commander, or just a small insurrection?”

“This is the standard small arms complement for a vessel of _Eumelia’s _class, Doctor,” Mary replied, and stepped to one of the racks to remove a revolver and a double handful of bullets from their places, all of which she signed for in the log by the door. “Current tactics call for capturing an airship rather than bringing her down, and boarding parties are the only way to do that.” She thumbed the brass casings into their chambers as she spoke, and looked up to see Watson giving her a look she could not interpret.

_Yes, I have killed people, and at close quarters_, Mary did not say, her lips twisting, and she looked away. Officers were permitted to wear their swords on duty, so she did not have to sign out one of the swords here; she slammed the cylinder back into the barrel of the revolver, and was ready. “Here,” she said, putting the spare bullets into the doctor’s hand; “enter however many you use down under my entry in the log. I think you two ought to stay here until Captain King sounds battle stations. Once she does, make for the gundeck as quickly as you can. The information bomb is in the aftmost compartment but one.”

“And what will you do?” Holmes asked. A woman who was more naïve than Mary—a woman who had never joined the Aery—might have thought he asked out of concern for her, but she didn’t have to look at him to know better.

“Go up to the roof deck and disable the bomb,” she said with a shrug, by which she intended to convey the fact that she could not speak with certainty. The detective nodded, his suspicions so obvious that Mary might have been insulted, but she was willing to make allowances given the circumstances.

“Good luck, Mr. Holmes, Doctor,” she said, looking at them both briefly.

“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Holmes said with derision, but Watson nodded.

“And to you, Commander,” he said, holding her gaze with his electric blue eyes for a moment longer than seemed strictly necessary. Mary put that thought aside for future consideration, assuming she survived the evening, and hurried out of the compartment.


	5. London Again

Watson was not terribly surprised by the fact that their ramshackle plan had fallen apart at the first opportunity; he had been with Holmes long enough to see the detective’s love of the baroque for its theatrical possibilities betray him. What did surprise and intrigue him was the apparent reversal in Mary Morstan’s allegiances, and though he had no intention of taking it at face value, he was quite willing to gamble on it, if only for lack of a more pleasing alternative.

He and Holmes had just finished checking and loading their revolvers, and Watson was painstakingly scratching out Morstan’s entry in the “bullets” column of the logbook, when he heard a slight thump on the decking behind him and he turned in time to see Irene Adler, her hair coming loose and her airwoman’s uniform smudged black in places, standing in the centre of the compartment. “Put down a revolver in that logbook, Doctor, please,” she said, crossing to the racks of guns, and Watson, with a helpless glance at Holmes, did as she asked.

“I cannot believe she left you in here,” Adler said casually, loading the revolver she had selected, and Watson added another six bullets to the correction he was making. “Maybe she is serious about her loyalties.”

She looked up from her gun just in time to meet Holmes’s eyes. “And please, Mr. Holmes, if you are going to make some sort of witty remark about loyalty that is intended as an insult, don’t waste your breath.”

Holmes, who had opened his mouth presumably to do just that, shut it again; Watson didn’t bother to conceal his smile. Adler replaced the cylinder in the barrel of her revolver with a click and shoved the gun through the belt of her purloined uniform before straightening to regard the two men. “Well, gentlemen, what are you waiting for?”

“I don’t think that’s—“ Holmes began just as Watson said, “Morstan told us to—“

But Adler waved an unconcerned hand. “Yes, and if she told you to throw yourself off this ship, would you do what she asked? You don’t know what sort of game she’s playing, Mr. Holmes, Doctor, and if you will take my advice you will not play into her hands any more than you must.”

“What would you suggest, then, Miss Adler?” Holmes asked, voice dry as the air, and the singer smiled slightly.

“We’ll be over London in half an hour. Mr. Holmes, if you don’t mind intimacy with pipefittings, you may follow me into the service passages between this deck and the gundeck; they are slightly wider. Dr. Watson, if you are willing to risk them, you may come along, or you may remain here and then take your chances once they sound battlestations. I doubt it will be long.”

“How wide are these passages?” Watson asked, doubtful despite his own inclination, and Adler crouched down to lift up a trapdoor he hadn’t noticed in the floor of the compartment, revealing a passage perhaps three feet square, floored with metal grating and with pipes running the length of one entire side. They were insulated, he could see, but he already knew that there was no way he—or more to the point, his leg—could go that way.

“I’m afraid I shall have to leave you to it, Miss Adler,” he said, making his tone buoyant, but he was not really talking to her; Holmes met his eyes over her head, concern clear in his gaze.

“Mother hen,” he began, “I don’t think—“

“Holmes, I shall be fine,” Watson interrupted, cutting him off. He did not say, _I can take care of myself_, although it was true; Holmes would merely list a reel of occasions, mostly at the beginning of their partnership, when Watson had not been able to take care of himself, they would bicker with an edge to it, and both of them would end up licking their wounds. More importantly, the argument would waste time. “Truly. Now, _go_.”

Holmes’s lips twisted, but he made no protest, for which Watson was grateful. Adler too seemed to intuit that this was not quite the time for persiflage; instead she merely said, “This way, Mr. Holmes,” and swung herself down into the passageway. Holmes followed her gamely, but he turned slightly to look back up at Watson, who shut the hatch in his face with far more conviction than he truly felt.

The armoury seemed emptier without them than it had before. Watson waited, with learned patience, a good five minutes by his timepiece until another, higher-pitched set of bells began ringing throughout the ship: battlestations.

The doctor closed his watch, tucked the timepiece back into his waistcoat, and made sure his hat was settled just so on his head. Then he too left the armoury, shutting the door to the compartment behind him.

 

Holmes followed Adler down the passageway, both of them on their hands and knees; they crawled steadily, the insulated but still-hot pipes above them brushing Holmes’s back every so often. After what seemed like a long time, but what was probably less than ten minutes, Adler paused over another hatch, the light from the compartment below illuminating her features in patches. He could not hear anything suspicious from the compartment, but they were close to the engine room and it was difficult to perceive any quiet sounds over the constant dull thrum.

Adler very carefully turned onto her side so that Holmes, also on his side, could inch himself forward to see a little for himself. They were pressed tightly together. “It looks empty,” she whispered, and then before Holmes could say anything she struck two corners of the grate sharply, popping it out of place—unlike the decks above, these grates swung out—and levered herself down and through.

Holmes watched her draw her revolver instantly and peer around, checking that there was no one else in the compartment. “It’s empty,” she called up to him, and he immediately clambered down, lowering himself to the deck feet first.

As she had said, they were the only people in the small compartment, which was nonetheless occupied by a great clockwork device in its centre, wires trailing from it out the wedged door and a slow, foreboding ticking issuing from somewhere in its depths.

“Remarkable,” Adler breathed, already on the information bomb’s other side. Despite Countess Lovelace’s explanations, Holmes had only a yeoman’s grasp of how the bomb was meant to function, but of course complete comprehension was not essential to disarm the thing. He could disassemble and study it at his leisure after King sat awaiting her fate in gaol.

They each took several minutes to scrutinize the device thoroughly, and at length Holmes pointed to a saucer-sized gear assembly surmounted by a clock face and said, “I believe this is—“ just as Adler indicated the same clump of clockwork, saying, “This seems to be—“ and they both stopped and looked at each other, eyebrows raised.

“Ladies first,” Holmes said, with the slightest possible bow.

Adler’s dark eyebrow climbed higher up her features, but she accepted the courtesy. “The mathematics behind this device are complex,” she said quickly, “but the device itself is rather crude. I believe that if we cut those wires, and stop these gears turning, we can dismantle it well enough for our purposes.”

“Inelegant,” Holmes said, but in the little time remaining there was hardly a better alternative; “but effective. Must we cut the wires at the same time as we stop the gears, do you think?”

“I do,” she said, and only the infinitesimal stiffening of her shoulders betrayed her unease. “You take the wires, Mr. Holmes, and I shall attend to the gears.”

Holmes saw no probable gain in arguing; rather he took the wires in question in his hand, bunching them together against the edge of Adler’s stiletto, which she handed to him. “Ready?” he asked, but instead of an affirmation he heard her swear.

Adler swore again when he looked up at her. “I need another pair of hands,” she explained, swearing again. “There is too much tension on the frame of the assemblage to dismantle it one-handed.”

“Let me just—“ said Holmes, but a familiar voice interrupted him.

“I have another idea,” Watson said from the door of the compartment, shutting it against the wedge behind him. Holmes saw at once that the doctor was not completely presentable; clearly he had run into at least some Aery personnel. “I shall cut the wires, and you two can break the gears.”

“Capital,” said Holmes immediately. Watson crossed the compartment and he handed the wires to him. “Did you have any trouble, old boy?”

“A little,” Watson allowed, unsheathing six inches of his swordstick and setting the wires against the blade. “I do not care for this business of striking women, Holmes, even if they are wearing men’s uniforms.”

“Women’s uniforms,” said Adler from Holmes’s other side, but she sounded distracted. “Mr. Holmes, if you would—“

“Of course.” Holmes took the gear assembly from Adler, a little surprised by the force required to hold it out away from the body of the device itself. Adler had palmed her stiletto back from him, and had another of her lockpicks in her left hand. She set the two instruments at specific points in the clockwork and looked over at Watson. “On three, Doctor. One, two—three!”

Watson slashed the wires nearly simultaneously with a forceful turn of his wrist at the same time as Adler wedged her stiletto into the interlocking teeth of the two central gears and twisted viciously, breaking the hands on the watch face with the lockpick. The ticking from within the device wound down slowly and then, at last, stopped with a shuddering thunk.

The three of them regarded each other uneasily, tension still jangling between them. “It cannot be that simple,” Watson said, slotting the blade of his stick back into the body of the cane.

“I agree,” Adler said immediately. “There is something awry here.”

“How much time until we reach London?” Holmes asked, turning to look at the upper corners of the compartment in turn.

The doctor consulted his timepiece. “Eight minutes?” he hazarded, peering at its face; doubtless the exact numbers were hard to make out in the dim lighting.

Holmes turned back to regard the information bomb, taking his pipe out of his pocket and clamping it between his teeth, reminding himself that he could not light it, or rather that Commander Morstan had told him he could not light it. What had Adler said? Complex, but crude.

Complex, but crude…

Countess Lovelace had shown no compunction about showing them her plans for the device; Captain King swore that the countess had gone north for no treasonous purpose. Complex, but crude…

Holmes opened his mouth, and when his pipe actually fell from between his teeth he caught it without paying true attention. He looked up at Watson, who was staring at him with the focus that meant he knew that Holmes was on the verge of a conclusion, and he was just about to share his deduction—it was brilliant, he knew—when a harsh crackling came from the speaking tube in the far corner.

“Bridge calling Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson,” a woman’s voice said, distorted by transmission but marked by a noticeable Welsh accent. “Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson, please respond!”

Watson and Holmes traded glances and then crossed the compartment to the speaking tube assembly. “Can they tell where we are in the ship if we answer?” Watson asked, saving Holmes the indignity of voicing the same question.

“I do not _think_ so,” said Adler slowly, poking at the copper tubing in question.

“Mr. Holmes, Dr. Watson, if you can hear this, Commander Morstan’s compliments, and please come to the bridge immediately.” The woman—a communications officer, Holmes surmised—sounded frustrated.

“If King were on the bridge it would be her compliments, not Morstan’s,” Watson said flatly. “She must be absent.”

“Then where is she?” Adler asked, again saving Holmes’s breath.

“How many minutes now, mother hen?” Holmes asked, pulling out his own timepiece.

“Two.”

“Miss Adler, do you know what day it is?”

Adler frowned. “Tuesday, Mr. Holmes.”

Tuesday, at two minutes to eight, over the heart of London.

Holmes shut his own pocket watch with a snap. “Captain King is on her way to visit her uncle the King at the Royal Theatre,” he said. “With an army at the gates of Buckingham Palace.”

“An army?” Watson repeated. “Holmes, what—“

Holmes was already heading for the door. “Come along, Watson, Miss Adler,” he said, not bothering to turn his head to look back at them. “We are expected on the bridge.”

Watson and Adler followed Holmes up two decks and all the way forward at something just less than a run; they were almost to the bridge when the _Eumelia_ rocked violently, throwing Watson into the wall and Holmes and Adler into each other. After a few dazed seconds in which the tremor was not repeated, all three steeled themselves and pressed on.

The doctor had vaguely envisioned the deck of a sailing ship, but when he stepped through the compartment behind Holmes, bending his head to fit through the door as always, he saw that he could not have been more mistaken: a great port window perhaps eight or nine feet in diameter, composed of trapezoidal panes of glass, confronted them at the other end of the roughly semi-spherical chamber. Four women sat around a narrow upper deck, strapped into their chairs with buckled harnesses, and Mary Morstan sat in a central command chair on the deck below them, in front of another officer who was clearly the helmswoman. She had turned in her chair to look over at them when Holmes opened the compartment door.

Morstan inclined her head, the only sign of their circumstances a certain serrated edge to her small smile. “So glad you could join us, Doctor, Mr. Holmes.” Her eyes skipped over the two men to alight on Adler, still in her airwoman’s kit, and for a moment they narrowed. “The secret you mentioned, I trust?”

In front of Watson Holmes shrugged, nonchalant. “Not my secret,” he repeated, “although I do apologize for the wait, Commander.” He glanced around and immediately threaded his way past the officers on the upper deck, squeezing against the narrow metal railing, to a large brass telescope mounted in a stand. “Captain King has absconded, I take it?”

“She has betrayed us all, and her oaths to the Crown,” Morstan said tightly, a ripple going through the bridge officers at her words, and Watson thought that she might give Adler a run for her money as an actress. No one hearing her now would guess that this morning she had sat and listened to King’s talk of treason with perfect composure.

But saying as much now would most likely earn them a rather ignominious death, and Watson had no intention of dying without his feet on solid ground. “Where is King?” he asked, crossing his arms. “For that matter, where are we?”

It was a reasonable question; a great layer of clouds could be discerned out the viewport, steel blue in the last light of the sun, but there was no indication as to their position relative to the earth.

“London,” Morstan answered briefly, staring at her timepiece. “Gentlemen, I advise you to hold on to something. Catherine, what is our altitude?”

“Twenty-two hundred feet, sir.”

“Drop to eight hundred feet, unpowered, on my mark,” Morstan ordered; it was not lost on Watson that at least one of the women flinched at her words. “Lieutenant Hyde, Lieutenant Commander Jones, acknowledge.”

The communications officer turned the speaking tube in question so that another woman’s voice, evidently the chief engineer’s, could be heard. “Acknowledged, Captain,” the engineer said, sounding grim. “Engines and off-gassing on your signal.”

“On my signal,” Morstan ordered. “Three—two—one—mark!”

Watson did not realize that he had begun to disregard the thrum of the engines until they cut out entirely; the silence was nauseating, and the ship dropped ponderously. Her helium was more than enough to keep her dumbly afloat, which must mean that the engineers were venting gas to lose altitude quickly. It was a decisive move; _Eumelia_ would remain at roughly the same altitude, well within range of what little defensive batteries the city did have, until she was captured or her gasbags resupplied.

They dropped through the clouds into the clear at roughly nine hundred feet on the altimeter, and Morstan ordered the engines cut back in at almost the same moment. Watson realized suddenly that the great golden thing below and ahead of them to the starboard was the dome of St. Paul’s; _Eumelia _glided past above it almost before he knew it. 

“To answer your first question, Doctor, Captain King took one of the emergency gliders,” Morstan said into the silence. “She is somewhere down in the city as we speak.”

“A glider?” Watson asked. “Is that safe, from that altitude?”

“We are trained at twenty-five hundred feet, and the winds are calm today,” Morstan answered with a shrug.

“I know where His Majesty is,” Irene Adler volunteered from the rear of the bridge, and every eye in the compartment turned to her, even those of the officers who could only stare surreptitiously. She raised an eyebrow. “It’s common knowledge that he is having an affair with the divine Sarah—Sarah Bernhardt. She is performing in a revival of _Fédora _at His Majesty’s Theatre starting tonight.”

There was a short silence in which everyone paused to digest this information. At length Holmes shrugged. “That is certainly one method of avoiding the Horse Guards.”

“And assassination in a theatre is rather easy to attempt,” Watson remarked, trying to bait Adler. Disappointingly, she made no response other than to smile at him.

“Captain, the crow’s nests are reporting signal flags from the Tower, demanding that we stand down,” the communications officer said, her ear pressed to the bell of yet another speaking tube. “_Hippolyta_ and _Boudicca_ are being summoned from Nunhead.”

Morstan exhaled slowly. “Inform all hands that we shall not, repeat, shall _not_, return fire if we are fired upon, Lieutenant Pitt; all stations acknowledge.” The officer—Pitt—turned back to her ranks of tubes, and as a chorus of orders repeated and confirmed washed back from her station, Morstan glanced at her guests. “We shall be above His Majesty’s Theatre before they reach us, anyway,” she said, which Watson did not precisely find reassuring, but Morstan was not looking at him.

“Could you recognize His Majesty’s Theatre from above, Miss—?” she asked, and Adler stepped forward, as regal as a queen.

“Irene Adler, Commander,” she said quietly. “And yes, I know what His Majesty’s looks like from the rooftops.” Hearing her words, Holmes cast a significant glance at Watson.

“Excellent,” said Morstan, though she did not offer to shake Adler’s hand. “If you’ll be so kind as to stand by my helmswoman and direct her—“

Adler stepped down past Morstan to stand by the helmswoman, who looked back towards her commander. “Sir—“

“Ahead quarter-power, Lieutenant, at Miss Adler’s direction,” Morstan ordered.

Even at quarter-power an airship moved very fast, though this low to the ground the ride was much less smooth than at two or three thousand feet, frequent minor jolts forcing Holmes and Watson to keep one hand on the railings constantly. In only a few minutes they were hovering almost directly above His Majesty’s Theatre at an altitude of eight hundred feet.

“His Majesty’s Theatre, Captain,” the helmswoman announced.

“Power off engines; station keeping only,” Morstan ordered. “Helm, bring us down to five hundred feet.”

Holmes had his face pressed to the eyepiece of the telescope mounted just inside the port window, adjusting its focus. “What do you make of that, old boy?” the detective asked in an undertone, straightening, and Watson bent himself nearly in half to look.

They were nearly half a mile away, as the crow flew, but at their height the army of which Holmes had spoken was nonetheless immediately clear: not a regular army, but a great crowd of women in sober colours filled the Mall before Buckingham Palace with great banners and buntings and sashes of white and purple and blue, their suffragist messages indecipherable at this distance. Lines of policemen in their black and silver uniforms, centurion helmets strapped under their chins, separated the women from the fence around the Palace proper.

“Holmes, that’s—“ Watson said, looking up sharply, but interrupted himself when Holmes put his hand on his shoulder.

“Indeed,” he said shortly, and Watson became conscious that Mary Morstan was watching them out of the corner of her eyes. There was a choice here, and they made it without long debate.

“We must stop Captain King,” Morstan said when they turned back towards her. “_I_ must stop Captain King, before she destroys the Aery.”

“And we shall accompany you,” Holmes agreed smoothly. Irene Adler did not say anything, but she did step across the bridge towards the two men, clearly intending to do as the detective said.

“Wonderful,” Morstan said after a tense pause, and then she turned to her officers. “Miss Hyde, you are in command,” she said crisply; “I can’t spare Lieutenant Commander Bacon from the engine room as long as our sister ships are incoming. I will give you my mark when we leave here; in five minutes, you may strike the propellers.”

The navigator, whose name was evidently Hyde, stood up from her station without any evident concern. “Aye, Commander,” she said, and when Morstan had unbuckled herself from the command chair and crossed to the compartment door she saluted. Beyond the social pale or no, Watson thought as he and Holmes followed Morstan out, these women certainly did not lack for courage.

 

They retraced their steps to the gundeck, Watson tugging his gloves onto his hands as they went. The _Eumelia_ was embracing the classic air bombardment tactic of hovering so low to the ground that defenders could not risk more than small arms fire for fear of bringing the colossal airship down literally on top of them: the very roofs of Pall Mall seemed ridiculously close after the more distant vistas of three thousand feet.  

The airwomen on duty at the central “hangar” opening saluted when they saw Morstan; Watson took a look at the ground floating beneath them through the wide aperture and felt his hand clench involuntarily on the grip of his swordstick. “How do we get down?” he asked Morstan, speaking loudly to be heard over the noise of the engines. A crowd was already gathering in the streets below; men and women could be seen pointing and gesticulating, but their words were inaudible.

She shrugged. “We’re too close for gliders,” she replied; “it’ll have to be the ladder.” As she spoke, some of the airwomen began paying out lengths of the chain-link ladder to which they had been forced to cling when she had abducted them two days ago and five hundred miles north. When enough of it was dangling into open space, Morstan herself climbed down it quickly, stopping only a few rungs above the weighted end.

Holmes followed her as the length kept unspooling, and with a mental curse for whoever had thought to leave the ground in the first place Watson tucked his swordstick firmly under his arm and did the same, his shoes resting one rung above Holmes’s head when he stopped and looped his good arm around the rung at shoulder-height. Adler did the same, and then the airwomen let the ladder go much faster; they dropped to the roof of the theatre perhaps a minute later with a heart-stopping jerk.

It was nearly full dark now, and the _Eumelia_ was only a dim white shape above them while the ladder, clanking, was drawn back up into her holds. Morstan watched it go for a few fleeting seconds, the light from the gaslamps in the streets and on the theatre façade shining dully on her hair and uniform buttons. Then she deliberately squared her shoulders and looked around.

Adler, however, was already moving across the rooftop with the purpose of someone who has been in a place before and knows the way. Without a word she struck the rusted padlock from a trapdoor at the end of the roof with the butt of her purloined Aery revolver, and she and Holmes heaved it open.

“We are above the house,” Adler said quietly, nodding downwards; “this attic provides access to the gas lines for the chandelier in the mural ceiling. We shall have to make our way down into the loft and thence to the wings to get to the royal box.”

“Lead the way, Miss Adler,” Morstan said, pre-empting whatever remark Holmes had been about to make, and without another word the American took the stepladder down to the floor below.

Watson concentrated on keeping up with Holmes and the two women as Adler led them, with as much speed as possible, across the ceiling and over a rather large gap into the grid of steel catwalks above and behind the stage. The performance had already started; Watson did not know the plot, but he could hear a soprano voice beginning to sing while the last notes of the overture faded.

They scrambled down the same without regard for the noise they were making, and as they descended they drew more than a few glares from stagehands. “What are you—“ someone began angrily, but Morstan, who had somehow overtaken Adler in the lead, waved them off brusquely.

“Aery business, sir; you will excuse us,” she snapped, not even looking at the man, who took a closer look at the two women in uniform and the two men behind them, all four purposeful and armed, and stepped back.

They had to make their way down to the ground level to reach the boxes in the second circle, and they emerged into the opulent, deserted corridors of the theatre, the rich carpet and golden gaslights disorienting after _Eumelia_’s Spartan interiors. At Adler’s direction they doubled back on their own course, and paused just before they reached the corridor at the end of which the King’s guards could be seen outside the door to the royal box.

 “They seem as though nothing is wrong,” Watson whispered, chancing a glance around the corner; it was true.

“Captain King is His Majesty’s niece, after all,” Morstan murmured. “Unusual, perhaps, but not unheard of, for her to drop in on her uncle?”

“Evidently,” Holmes said very quietly, voice dripping his disapproval at the cavalier attitude involved.

Morstan glanced back at them, her intention clear, and Watson took his revolver in his left hand and his swordstick in his right, though he did not unsheathe the blade, while Holmes took out his revolver as well. Morstan in the lead, they crossed the carpet quickly, their weapons ready.

“Halt!” one of the guards had the presence of mind to say, both men instantly snapping to the alert.

“Commander Mary Morstan of His Majesty’s Airship _Eumelia_,” Morstan introduced herself, not stopping. “Victoria King is in there with His Majesty, is she not?”

The guards had the presence of mind to look uneasy, which was all the confirmation required. “His Majesty’s life is in danger, gentlemen,” Morstan told them. “Let me through.”

She was not technically a captain, but it was a captain’s voice, trained to command and certain in it, and with another glance at each other the two guards stepped aside. Without another word or look Morstan burst through the door, Holmes and Watson at her heels.

His Majesty Edward VII, by the grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, was sitting in one of the royal box’s plush velvet chairs, angled so that he could see the stage. The royal box was the largest in the theatre, nearly a dozen feet at the balcony; Captain Victoria King was perched on another velvet chair well back in the box’s interior, out of the view of the house. The dimmed gaslights glinted on the revolver she had trained on the King.

At sixty-nine the King was still a vigorous man, and he was glaring with all the fury of a man wrongfully accused at his niece. Countess Ada Lovelace, in the dark blue velvet mantle and ostrich-plumed bonnet of a Lady Companion of the Garter, stood to one side even farther back. Her golden collar and the shield of St. George’s Cross stitched in silver thread onto her mantle sparkled when she turned towards them, but Watson could see no surprise in her blue eyes.

“Commander Morstan,” King said, her eyes not wavering from the King despite the fact that Morstan had trained her pistol on her. “I wondered whether you might realize my deception in time to join us.”

“Yes, Captain, with the help of Mr. Holmes and Doctor Watson, I was able to figure it out,” Morstan said quietly, and Watson shut his mouth firmly on the automatic protest of their complete uninvolvement. Why she wished to implicate them to the King he had no idea, but it was too late to prevent it.

“Ah, yes, I ought to make introductions,” King said, voice etched in acid. “Uncle, this is Commander Mary Morstan, my first officer aboard the _Eumelia_. Behind her stand the celebrated consulting detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his loyal companion Dr. John Watson, late of the Army medical branch. Lady Ada, I believe you are already acquainted with my unwilling guests, are you not?”

“I am,” said the countess, nodding at them. Watson realized abruptly that Irene Adler had disappeared.

The King turned in his chair to regard them, his back turned fully on the house. “Holmes and Watson,” he repeated thoughtfully. He had a pleasant baritone voice, though the rasp of his bronchitis lurked in it, and Watson thought privately that in his medical opinion Edward probably had perhaps until the year was out; he had enjoyed the throne only seven years so far, but such was the unhappy fate of someone who had spent longer as heir apparent than anyone else in British history. “I have read of your exploits in the papers, gentlemen, and I cannot tell you how exciting it is to meet you. Perhaps when this unpleasantness is concluded—?” Only by a slight quirk of his eyebrow did he indicate the fact that his niece held him at gunpoint.

“Of course, Your Majesty,” Holmes replied, and Watson wanted to roll his eyes at the detective’s suave tone; one would never guess his true views on monarchical delusions from his manner. “May I ask, as a point of professional curiosity, just what Captain King has demanded?”

“Certainly,” said the King. “Victoria, why don't you repeat what you were just telling my lady Lovelace and I?”

“Votes for women, Uncle,” King said quietly, practically vibrating with anger. “Or at the very least, votes for Aery women. We give our lives for the realm; why may we not have a say in its governance?”

“How remarkable that you burst in on me with these demands, Victoria, on the very night that my mother’s good friend Countess Lovelace delivers a petition asking me for the same thing, _in peace_,” Edward observed, and then glanced at the group standing near the doorway. “Commander Morstan, I must impose on you to act as an arbiter. Should you like to have the vote?”

Morstan met her sovereign’s eyes without flinching, and Watson realized abruptly that he liked her; he had already known that he admired her. “Yes, Your Majesty, I should like that very much,” she replied, “and I daresay that every other woman in the Aery should feel the same. But I beg you, sire, not to judge us based on Captain King’s example. We should never ask for what we deserve—desire—by threatening you or anyone.”

“I am very glad to hear it,” the King told her. “Although I must admit that I have far more influence than actual power in Parliament. Which fact,” he continued, his tone sharpening, “my niece here ought to know very well.”

“You underestimate yourself, Uncle; you are immensely popular,” King retorted. “Were you to throw your voice behind the suffrage movement, giving women the vote would go through Parliament tomorrow.”

“Captain,” Countess Lovelace said quietly, “if we can gain our ends only through violence, we are no better than those who deny us our rights out of fear.”

“A fine sentiment, Countess, but ultimately naïve.” Holmes stirred at that, but said nothing; like Morstan and Watson, he kept his revolver trained on King.

“This has gone far enough, Captain,” Morstan said after the barest of pauses. “Drop your weapon, sir, or I shall be forced to shoot you.”

King smiled slightly. “Don’t be ridiculous, Mary; we both know you admire me too much to kill me in cold blood.”

“I do admire you, sir,” the commander allowed. “All the more reason to prevent you from tarnishing my image of you, don’t you think?”

“Victoria,” said Edward, sounding tired, “cease this nonsense. I shall see to it that the full details are never made public; I can do that much for my brother’s daughter.”

But King was shaking her head. “It’s not nonsense, Uncle,” she said, almost apologetic. “It is anything but. And if you cannot realize that, I am afraid that I must take drastic action to make it clear.” And with that she turned and pointed her gun, not at the King, but at Lady Ada. A moment later, she fired.

Watson, Holmes, and Morstan all reacted in the same instant; Holmes roughly grabbed Lady Ada and bore her down to the ground, contriving that she landed on top of him, while Morstan shot King through the heart, obviating Watson’s attempt to throw himself between the King and his niece.

The shot echoed in the crowded house, and after a short, shocked silence a great concerned hubbub arose in the theatre; from the sound of it, several women in the stalls were screaming, and shouts of “The King!” and “The King has been shot!” were clearly audible. With a pained glance at Watson, almost too intimate for the doctor to bear, the King turned in his chair and rose, lifting a hand to the audience in a gesture of acknowledgment and reassurance, and the din quieted slowly. On stage, Sarah Bernhardt had ceased to deliver her lines, but had not broken character.

The doctor had no attention for any of it; his first thought was for King, but when he had pocketed his revolver and bent over her limp form he saw that she was past concern. Her heart’s blood was still bubbling onto her emerald uniform, staining it a dull red, but even as she glanced up to meet his eyes the light in hers dimmed. Watson took her pulse in her left wrist, to do the thing properly: she was dead.

Behind him, Morstan took an involuntary step forward. “Captain—“ she said, sounding as if the word had been wrenched from her at great cost, and Watson placed King’s hand back in her lap with undue care. They really ought to lay the body out before rigor mortis set in, for ease of transporting it, but that would hardly be considerate of the commander’s obvious grief.

Watson looked up at her, imbuing his expression and voice with the calm certainty of a physician. “You are an excellent shot, Commander,” he told her quietly. “As you can see, it was very quick.”

Morstan closed the gap between them, reaching out the same hand that had squeezed the trigger to close King’s eyes. She whispered something as she did so that Watson did not catch, and he deliberately turned away, crossing the box to Holmes and Countess Lovelace, whom the detective had evidently just set back on her feet.

“Are you all right, my lady?” he asked her. Holmes, bending, retrieved Lovelace’s bonnet from the floor.

Lovelace waved a careless hand. “Fit as a fiddle, Doctor, thank you for asking. Young Mr. Holmes here _chivalrously_ saw to it that I came to no harm.” She smiled at the detective when he offered her her hat; Holmes looked embarrassed.

“Think nothing of it, Countess, please,” he said. “Your loss to science would be incalculable, after all.”

“And so flattering, too,” said Lovelace, but she smiled ruefully. “You mean that you wish to know more of the theory behind the information bomb.” She settled her hat back onto her head and adjusted her collar, which had gone askew, as she spoke.

“I did not know I had grown so predictable,” Holmes remarked, but Lovelace shook her head.

“Hardly, Mr. Holmes, but I know what curiosity looks like. It is, after all, my own defining trait.”

“Ah,” said Holmes, but his eyes were sliding away towards Morstan, who had composed herself in the interim and was now looking towards the King, who rose from his chair as unobtrusively as the monarch of an empire on which the sun never set could, crossing the carpet to look down at the body of his niece.

Given the events of the past few days, Watson could not particularly find it in his heart to regret King’s death, but of course he had not known her. From the honest grief on Edward’s face, he wondered suddenly whether His Majesty would thank Morstan for doing what she doubtless felt was her duty.

Countess Lovelace stepped past Holmes and laid a hand on the King’s arm, an intimacy that might have been shocking were it not for her age and unassailable position as one of the late Queen Charlotte’s confidantes, evidenced by her membership in the Order of the Garter. Lovelace said something to Edward, speaking low, that Watson made no effort to catch; after a minute Edward held up his hand, and the countess stopped talking immediately. The words of the performers onstage prowled at the box’s railing, but did not touch its interior and the silence that filled it.

“I believe you have just saved my life, gentlemen, Commander,” the King said with a heavy sigh that immediately descended into a coughing fit, and the four of them waited uncomfortably until Edward had caught his breath to continue. “I am indebted to each of you, and I shall honour the obligation, but perhaps not tonight.”

If there was one thing Victoria King had taught them, it was not to draw the attention of people connected to the royal family. Holmes immediately bowed deeply to the King. “Your Majesty is too kind,” he said; “I want nothing.” He even managed to sound creditably humble, which for the detective was a true accomplishment.

Watson shook his head as well. “Your Majesty is very generous, but I shall yield to Commander Morstan.”

“You are dangerous men, to want nothing,” the King said lightly, but he looked to Morstan nonetheless, and Watson breathed easier. “Well, Commander?” Edward asked. “What reward should you ask me, if I might grant it?”

Morstan hesitated visibly, grief threatening to puncture her mask. “The vote, sire,” she said at last, her voice nearly cracking. “And if that is not possible, then at least that we in the Aery may marry without being struck from the service. I do not know whether we could find husbands who would have us under such circumstances,” she admitted, speaking quickly, “but some of us at least should very much like to try.” She glanced at Watson out of the corner of her eye as she said it.

“Marriage,” said the King thoughtfully. “Well, I cannot deny that it has brought me much happiness. I have rather influence than actual power, Commander, but I give you my word nonetheless that I shall use it for you and your fellow officers, and in future I shall do the same for female suffrage.” He glanced at Countess Lovelace, fond irony clear on his bearded features. “Will that be acceptable, Countess?”

Lovelace curtsied. “Very much so, Your Majesty.”

“Excellent.” The King straightened. “And now, Commander, Doctor, Mr. Holmes, I must ask you to leave me. This,” he said, his face darkening when he glanced down at King’s body, “is something of a family affair.”

Watson did not have to be told twice, and between boredom and injury Holmes and Morstan were not inclined to argue. With all appropriate bowing and scraping, they very quickly made their exit.


	6. Epilogue

The corridor outside the box was full of policemen and the King’s bodyguards, and in the press Holmes and Watson were quickly separated from Morstan. After a brief, sarcastic interview with Inspector Lestrade, who seemed not at all surprised to see them, they were escorted to the theatre entrance and unceremoniously bundled into the hansom a constable summoned for them. Lestrade’s parting warning to tell no one what had happened rang in their ears when he shut the door on them. 

It was something of a relief to be jostled in the familiar unquiet of the cab’s leather interior, just like the thousands of others they had ridden throughout the maze of London. “I take it,” Watson said as the hansom turned sharply on to Curzon Street, “that your brilliant deduction was that the information bomb was a counterfeit.”

“A simple forgery, yes,” Holmes agreed, sounding peeved. “Lovelace told us herself that the theory could not be fully realized; it was King’s belief in it that nearly misled me.” With his arms crossed and a scowl on his face he certainly looked peeved, at least when the intermittent gaslights cast enough illumination to reveal his features. “Which reveals another mystery: did Captain King and Countess Lovelace plot this entire conspiracy between them? Or were the Countess and her inventions simply co-opted by King?”

“I cannot believe that was the sum total of her plans, to murder her uncle,” Watson said in frustration. “It makes no rational sense, Holmes.”

“Ah, but if one believes in the monarchical fantasy, mother hen, and believes further that the monarch is the sole person standing in the way of what one desires…” But Holmes fell silent before finishing his sentence. “I should wager that Commander Morstan might tell us. But I very much doubt that she ever shall.”

“Presuming we ever see her again,” Watson felt compelled to point out.

“Oh, I am quite sure we shall, old boy, and Miss Irene Adler too.”

Watson smiled. “And you are looking forward to that, aren’t you, Holmes?”

“First principles, Watson,” Holmes told him, putting on an annoyed tone of voice. “The world as a whole is duller than that cell in which King immured us. Commander Morstan and Miss Adler, whatever their myriad faults, are decidedly not boring. Ergo, should we encounter them again, I may be reasonably certain that my existence, at least temporarily, shall contain episodes of interest.”

“I recall you saying something about Victoria King’s potential to make your life interesting, when she first sought our acquaintance,” Watson reminded him.

They had arrived at Baker Street N.W., and Holmes opened the door and stepped into the street before he answered. “And I think we may both agree, mother hen, that in the end the good captain did not disappoint.” Holmes shot him a swift grin over his shoulder, leaving Watson to pay the driver while the detective walked up to their door. 

“No,” Watson agreed, following the shorter man up the steps, “she did not, at that.”

 

Almost immediately they settled back into what seemed to be their typical routine, but when Watson opened the papers over his breakfast a week later and saw that the celebrated American contralto Irene Adler was to perform a limited engagement in London starting that night, a possible reason for Holmes’s unpredictable disappearances in the interim was immediately clear. “I think he’s infatuated with her,” he said to Gladstone, folding the paper and setting it back on the table. Gladstone, who had taken their disappearance with all the phlegmatic disregard of his habitual attitude towards life in Baker Street, fixed him with an indifferent look.

“Not that he would ever admit it, should I tell him as much,” Watson continued, speaking to himself as much as to his dog. On the few occasions that Holmes had made extended excursions Watson had caught himself conducting conversations with Gladstone in which he himself supplied the dog’s replies. As a conversation partner, Gladstone left much to be desired, but the dog understood his exasperated love for Holmes perfectly. “Well, I shan’t worry about it until he turns up talking about giving up being a consulting detective to tread the boards, or to be a violinist in a pit orchestra.”

“Very sensible of you, Doctor,” a familiar soprano voice said from the sitting room doorway, and Watson stood up from his chair and turned to face Commander Mary Morstan in almost the same motion.

Mrs. Hudson stood behind the commander, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry, Doctor, but Miss Morstan”—their landlady favoured Morstan with a frank glare—“was unwilling to wait.”

“I only have a few minutes to spare, Doctor,” Morstan said, entering the room and taking Watson’s outstretched hand; she held it longer than was strictly necessary for a simple handshake. Before she let go he saw that the insignia on her uniform coat were different. “I’ve been promoted,” she explained when she noticed the direction of his gaze, her hand brushing the silver propeller embroidered on the breast of her coat, just above her heart. “Captain Mary Morstan, at your service.” She smiled. “In point of fact, they gave me back _Eumelia_.”

“Congratulations!” Watson exclaimed, and was glad to see her smile wider at his evident pleasure. “Truly, Captain, that is wonderful. I—“

“I take it, then, that Captain King’s death had no adverse effects on you, Captain?”

Watson and Morstan both turned towards Holmes, who had displaced Mrs. Hudson in the doorway and was in point of fact leaning against the frame in his usual disarray, collar open, cuffs undone, waistcoat missing and hair sticking up every which way. After living with him for so long Watson needed only one look to see that the detective was not entirely sober, though at this distance it was impossible to venture an opinion as to the exact cause.

Beside him Morstan lifted her chin. “I would not quite say _that_, Mr. Holmes,” she said, frost feathering the edges of her voice. “Captain King was my friend; I admired her, and her betrayal does not change that.”

Holmes shut the door behind him before he took a few steps farther into the room. “I am glad to hear it,” he said with the exquisite politeness that betokened danger. “May I make one further inquiry?”

Morstan smiled, the expression thin. “Trying your detection skills on me, Mr. Holmes? Please, go ahead; I am an open book, if you can read it.”

Holmes could never leave a challenge unanswered, except when he did not care. “Very well,” he said, as though he were granting a petition. “I _deduced_, Captain, that you and King planned the entire thing between you, along with Countess Lovelace.”

The airship captain raised one gold eyebrow. “An intriguing conclusion, Mr. Holmes, but where is your proof?” she asked, with an edge in her tone.

But Holmes heard it too. “You mistake me, Captain,” he informed her, his voice softening. “I could not care in the slightest what laws you broke; no one was harmed in the end beyond the mastermind herself. I merely wish to satisfy my curiosity.”

Morstan studied the detective frankly for several seconds, staring into his dark eyes; Holmes held her gaze without blinking, and Watson realized that his flatmate was perfectly serious when he said that he did not care about laws broken. But then, Holmes only cared about the law when it aligned with his own keenly honed sense of justice.

Which, unquestionably, was a felicitous thing for Watson himself.

“Very well, Mr. Holmes,” Morstan said at length; “perhaps, for the fact that we took advantage of you shamelessly, I owe you that much.” She paused, gathering her thoughts, and then spoke. “You already know that Captain King is—was—a byblow of Prince Arthur; it was why she entered the Aery, you know, to escape the liminal position in which her illegitimate birth entrapped her. By the time I joined _Eumelia_’s company she had already become obsessed by the idea that Aery officers were unfairly denied the privileges to which our service ought to entitle us. Countess Lovelace, God bless her, was not adverse to the idea of using her discoveries, and her connections to the suffrage movement, for harmless theatrics; she was great friends with the old Queen, you know, and I gather Her Majesty loved such pranks.”

Watson had moved to the sideboard and poured three brandies; he handed one each to Morstan and to Holmes, keeping one glass for himself. When he did so, Morstan smiled at him, and he was unable to keep from smiling back; he paid no mind to Holmes looking exasperated.

Morstan drained her brandy in one go. “It was not fixed in advance that I should shoot my captain,” she said quietly, looking into the glass rather than up at them. “But we did discuss it, and Captain King—Victoria—accepted the possibility that it might become necessary. She knew her own mind well enough to warn me that when it came to it her passions might well overcome her reason.” Her mouth twisted. “She was right.”

No one said anything for at least a minute, according to the clock on the mantelpiece, but at length Morstan did straighten. “And now, Mr. Holmes, I must ask you a question,” she told the detective. “Who is that Chinese spy you brought aboard my vessel?”

“She is _not_ a spy,” Holmes protested automatically, his affronted dignity sounding more ersatz even than usual to Watson’s trained ears. That was the trick, with Holmes; because he donned them knowingly, his moods were not entirely true, but nor were they entirely false.

“Did she tell you that?” Morstan asked, her smile indulgent.

“No, in point of fact, Captain, I _deduced_ it—“

Morstan actually snorted. “At least tell me her real name, Mr. Holmes,” she said. “There is no way she can have stowed aboard _Eumelia _without a motive beyond helping you two break out of your cell. Be reasonable.”

“It is not my secret, Captain,” Holmes said primly, but Watson had already decided that the conversation was too entertaining to be allowed to die. Instead he leaned over and snagged the morning’s newspaper from amongst the remains of breakfast; it was still folded over to the page showing a handsome etching of Irene Adler, rendered from a photograph, over the article about her appearance at the Royal.

This Watson handed to Morstan, disregarding the wounded look Holmes shot him. Morstan’s eyebrows rose as soon as she saw the image. “An _opera singer_?” she said incredulously. “What a droll persona to adopt, truly—and she did give us her real name, or at least the one she uses; how remarkable.”

“Miss Adler is a coloratura contralto, to be precise,” Holmes said doggedly, and Morstan chuckled.

“And a good many things besides, I am sure.”

Holmes shut his mouth at that, looking innocent, and Watson mentally changed his bet on an affair between them from ‘likely’ to ‘certain.’ A pity no bookkeepers would give him odds on it.

“Mr. Holmes!” A firm footstep echoed in the hallway, and Constable Clarky appeared in the door, his centurion helmet tucked into the elbow of his black and silver uniform at precise regulation angle. Lestrade had long since given up coming to see Holmes in person if he could at all help it; doubtless he had no desire to play the supplicant to Holmes’s Delphic oracle, and Watson for one privately applauded the inspector’s sagacity: when given an inch Holmes habitually took a mile.

“Doctor, Captain,” Clarky said when he stopped, nodding at Watson and Morstan in turn and, to his credit, giving no sign that he found either Morstan’s presence or uniform anything out of the ordinary. “Mr. Holmes, Inspector Lestrade requests that you come at once. There has been an incident requiring your assistance, as well as your extreme delicacy.” He cast a significant look at Morstan as he spoke, but Holmes waved a hand, dismissing his doubts.

“Captain Morstan is the Crown’s most loyal servant, Clarky, and you and Inspector Lestrade may trust her implicitly. What is this incident?”

“Sir, there has been a robbery at Admiralty House.”

It was always remarkable to see Holmes focus like a telescope within his usual scattershot persona. “A robbery?” he repeated, staring at the constable. “And what has been stolen?”

“Documents, sir, relating to the Aery, if I understand rightly,” said Clarky, his eyebrows drawing towards each other in that way that always seemed to presage the Yard being utterly out of its depth. “Inspector Lestrade suspects _foreign_ involvement, but we must move very quietly.”

“For fear of giving those same _foreign_ interests the pretext for an incident,” Holmes said shrewdly, and the constable nodded. “Hence calling on my services.”

“Precisely, sir.”

 “Well,” said Holmes, looking around the sitting room’s clutter, “as a private individual, Clarky, I am always happy to assist the police when they require it.” He found what he was looking for, a rather battered bowler hat, and set it on his head as he spoke, shucking his dressing gown and tossing it onto the settee. “Watson, Captain Morstan, would you care to accompany me? It promises to be a interesting case.”

The doctor and the airship captain glanced at each other, and Morstan gave him a very conspiratorial little smile; Watson could not help but wonder whether she had favoured Victoria King with it while they plotted together. “I should be honoured, Mr. Holmes,” she said firmly, and Watson shrugged.

“I am at your disposal as always, old boy,” he said, and Holmes grinned at him. 

“Excellent, Watson. I knew I could count on you.”

Watson rolled his eyes at Holmes’s back when the detective turned, gesturing to Clarky to lead on, and beside him Morstan actually giggled. Collecting coats, hats, and canes and riding crops as necessary, the three of them made their way down to the street, leaving Mrs. Hudson to clear the breakfast dishes behind them.

**Author's Note:**

> For those wishing to know a bit more about the underpinnings of this alternate history, I have written a bit more about the background [here at my DW](http://starlady.dreamwidth.org/339122.html).


End file.
